Palmiro Togliatti Quotes
Tomorrow we may even discuss our differences [with Soviet Communism]… Today we must defend the socialist revolution … When the guns of the counter-revolutionaries are in operation one must be on one or the other side of the barricades. There is no third camp.
This is an example of what made the Cold War so difficult. The Italian Communists had great misgivings about the Russian version of Communism that tended to abuse human rights and try and control other countries. However, when the Russian Communists were under world attacks by the West, as with their incursion into Hungary, he urged that all the Communists stick together and defend the Russians even for policies that they thought wrong. On the West side, the same thing occurred. The United States tolerated and supported a number of terribly oppressive dictatorships that were virulently anti-Communist. Polarization was the international norm.
Palmiro Togliatti, 1893-1964, Italian Communist Party Leader and Cofounder, Chief, Spanish Cominterm, Reaction to pressure to support the Hungarian uprising against the Russian controlled Hungarian Communist Party, L’Unita, October 26, 1956
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
After the 1917 Russian Revolution many of the Western Countries sent troops to Russia where they aided the Whites against the Reds. When the Red Bolsheviks prevailed, there were many attempts to diplomatically and economically undermine the Communist government. This caused a unity among different Russian factions. Sforza urged leaving them alone and letting the Bolsheviks fail by their own ideology. Most Western nations and the United States did not agree with him.
Vladimir Lenin. While Lenin was of this view, Stalin and other hard liners disagreed. They not only imposed their brand of communism on their own people via force with terrible consequences for any dissidents, but the Soviet Army imposed Communism on most of the states of Eastern Europe, and those states in turn used their Armies and secret police to impose it on their own citizens.
Vladimir Lenin
This became known as the Brezhnev Doctrine.
The British suspected that the Turks of Anatolia were complicit with Bolshevism
Ataturk was not receptive toward Communism as some other world leaders were at the time. He saw its weakness far earlier than many others.
Commenting on political parties in Cuba:
Palmiro Michele Nicola Togliatti was an Italian politician and leader of the Italian Communist Party from 1927 until his death. He was nicknamed Il Migliore ("The Best") by his supporters. In 1930 he became a citizen of the Soviet Union and later he had a city in that country named after him: Tolyatti.
