The Tito-Stalin Split, the Italian Left and the Fascination with Anti-Stalinist Communism

The contribution will focus on the impact of the Tito-Stalin split on the Italian Left. As is known, the reactions were diversified. On the one hand there was the position of the Italian Communist and Socialist Parties who supported Stalin mostly through media, although minor groups tried to support in Istria a secret movement of "resistance" against Tito. But more surprising for the time being was the process that started some years later, in 1951, when a closest collaborator of Togliatti, Valdo Magnani, took a public political position in support of communist autonomy from Moscow. Excluded from his party, he established a new anti-Stalinist movement, close to Tito, that divided the Italian Left and encouraged Yugoslavia to dream that a communist anti-Stalinist movement could rise in Western Europe. Although this hope vanished soon, the event had a great psychological impact on the Yugoslav leadership. Based on public Italian and Yugoslav archives as well as private archives, this chapter reconstructs for the first time hopes and illusions that an anti-stalinist communist left could have been rooted in the Italian political sphere in the aftermath of the Tito-Stalin split.