---
aliases:
- Italian Communist Party
- PCI
- Partito Comunista Italiano
- Italian Communists
category: Government Organization
created: 2026-05-17
end: 1991-02-03
location: Rome, Italy
start: 1921-01-21
summary: The Italian Communist Party (PCI) was Western Europe's largest communist
  party, achieving 34 percent of the Italian vote in 1976 under Enrico Berlinguer's
  Eurocommunist leadership, whose proposed historic compromise with the Democrazia
  Cristiana was ended by Aldo Moro's murder in 1978 and which dissolved in 1991 to
  become the Democratic Party of the Left.
tags:
- Organization
- Italy
- Politics
- ColdWar
- Eurocommunism
- 1920s
- 1940s
- 1950s
- 1960s
- 1970s
- 1980s
title: Italian Communist Party
updated: 2026-05-17
---

The Partito Comunista Italiano (Italian Communist Party, PCI) was founded on January 21, 1921, in Livorno, as a split from the Italian Socialist Party led by Antonio Gramsci and Palmiro Togliatti. It became the largest communist party in any Western democracy and the second-largest party in Italy throughout the postwar period, dissolving in February 1991 to reconstitute itself as the Partito Democratico della Sinistra (Democratic Party of the Left, PDS).[^1]

### Postwar Position

The PCI emerged from the Resistance as one of Italy's two mass parties (alongside the [Democrazia Cristiana](/organizations/democrazia-cristiana/)). Under Togliatti, who led the party from 1927 until his death in 1964, it followed the "Italian road to socialism" - parliamentary participation rather than insurrection. The CIA and the Western alliance treated the PCI's large electoral base as a fundamental security threat, and the [Gladio](/programs/operation-gladio/) stay-behind network was explicitly designed in part to prevent a communist electoral victory from leading to communist governance.

In the critical 1948 election, against a joint PCI-PSI electoral front, the DC won approximately 48% to the left coalition's 31% - a result shaped partly by CIA financial support for the DC and partly by the Church's mobilization of its institutional networks. The defeat set the terms of Italian politics for the next generation: the PCI as the permanent opposition, the DC as the permanent government.[^1]

### Berlinguer and Eurocommunism

[Enrico Berlinguer](/people/enrico-berlinguer/) became General Secretary in 1972 and transformed the PCI's international positioning. He explicitly distanced the party from Moscow, supported Italian membership in [NATO](/organizations/nato/), condemned the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and articulated Eurocommunism - the doctrine that Western communist parties should pursue democratic socialism independently of Soviet direction.

Under Berlinguer the PCI reached its electoral peak of approximately 34% in the 1976 elections, making it the largest communist party in any NATO member state and placing it within reach of government participation. The "historic compromise" - Berlinguer's proposal for formal cooperation between the PCI and the DC - was the political project whose realization the [Red Brigades](/organizations/brigate-rosse/) kidnapping of [Aldo Moro](/people/aldo-moro/) prevented.[^2]

### The Painful Position

The PCI's most contested decision was its support for the DC government's refusal to negotiate for Moro's release in 1978. Berlinguer, calculating that the PCI's institutional credibility required supporting the state against terrorism, backed [Giulio Andreotti](/people/giulio-andreotti/)'s no-negotiation stance. This position - supporting the death of the politician who was the PCI's primary interlocutor in the DC - was deeply painful within the party and ultimately delegitimizing for the historic compromise project.[^2]

### Dissolution

Following the collapse of Soviet communism in 1989-1991, the PCI dissolved at its congress of February 3, 1991. The majority faction became the PDS. A minority faction that rejected the transformation founded Rifondazione Comunista (Communist Refoundation). The PDS subsequently merged into the broader center-left Democratici di Sinistra and eventually the Partito Democratico. The PCI's organizational disappearance was one of the most significant realignments in postwar European politics.[^1]

[^1]: Ginsborg, Paul. *A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics 1943-1988.* Penguin, 1990. Sassoon, Donald. *One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century.* New Press, 1996.
[^2]: Hellman, Stephen. *Italian Communism in Transition: The Rise and Fall of the Historic Compromise in Turin, 1975-1980.* Oxford University Press, 1988. Drake, Richard. *The Aldo Moro Murder Case.* Harvard University Press, 1995.