Togliatti, Palmiro

(born March 26, 1893, Genoa—died Aug. 21, 1964, Yalta, Ukraine, U.S.S.R.) Italian communist leader. After serving in World War I, in 1919 he helped found the left-wing weekly L'Ordine Nuovo (“New Order”), which became a rallying point for the breakaway communist wing of the Socialist Party (1921). He edited the Communist Party newspaper and was a member of the party's central committee from 1924. He was in Moscow when the party was banned in Italy (1926); he remained in exile and became a member of the Comintern secretariat (1935). He returned to Italy in 1944 and served in a coalition government as vice premier (1945). He advocated a national, democratically oriented form of communism and made the Italian Communist Party the largest in western Europe. See also Democratic Party of the Left.

Source: Encyclopedia Britannica