Luigi Longo

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Luigi Longo

Luigi Longo (born March 15, 1900 in Fubine Monferrato , province of Alessandria , † October 16, 1980 in Rome ), known by his battle name Gallo , was an Italian politician and general secretary of the PCI from 1964 to 1972.

Life

Early political activity

Longo was the son of a Piedmontese small farmer and, as a student at the Turin Polytechnic , was involved in the youth organization of the PSI for political propaganda from a Marxist perspective from 1919 . As a regular visitor to the offices of L'Ordine Nuovo , the newspaper founded by Antonio Gramsci , he was in contact with Antonio Gramsci and Palmiro Togliatti . At the PSI congress in Livorno in 1921 , he was one of the main instigators of the split in the party when the supporters of the Leninist line founded the PCI. Alongside Togliatti, Gramsci and others, Longo quickly became one of the leading figures in the new PCI.

When Benito Mussolini established his fascist regime in Italy in 1922 , Longo became involved. He was an ardent anti-fascist . He was briefly arrested in 1925 and emigrated to France in 1926 before a wave of arrests , where he became one of the most important personalities of the PCI. In the same year he was a member of the delegation to the Congress of the Third International in Moscow . He traveled to Moscow several times in the following years, where he also met Stalin and other members of the Soviet leadership. In 1926 he was a member of his party's central committee and was promoted to the Politburo in 1931 . In 1933 he became a member of the political commission of the Comintern. In keeping with the Comintern's new popular front strategy in 1934, he signed a declaration by PCI and PSI on joint resistance actions.

Spanish Civil War and World War II

In the Spanish Civil War , Luigi Longo commanded a communist unit at the Battle of Madrid before the arrival of the XI. International Brigade in Madrid on November 8, 1936. Under his command, two communist battalions and a battery of 105-millimeter Vickers field guns tried to stop the nationalists at the gates of Madrid. As an inspector of the International Brigades under Randolfo Pacciardi in the Republican troops, Longo continued to take part in the Spanish Civil War. At that time he was given the battle name Gallo . After the defeat of the Spanish Republic by Francisco Franco , Longo went to France.

After the outbreak of World War II , Longo was arrested and interned in the Le Vernet collection and deportation camp from 1939 to 1941. In 1941 he was extradited to the Italian fascist authorities and deported to Ventotene in southern Italy . After Mussolini's arrest on July 25, 1943, Longo was released and took command of the Garibaldi Brigade , the communist forces within the Italian Resistance . His partisan group operated in the Rome area. He later became the vice-commander of the " Gruppo volontari per la libertà " (= group of volunteers for freedom) and a close collaborator of Ferruccio Parri . In April 1945 Longo became one of the leading figures who organized the uprising against the fascist-ruled Italian Social Republic in the Nazi- occupied northern Italy. He and his partisan group were largely responsible for tracking down Benito Mussolini, who was in hiding, who was shot and hung by his legs. According to sources, Longo is said to have been involved in the shooting of Mussolini. The exact circumstances of the shooting of Mussolini and his lover Clara Petacci are still controversial.

After the Second World War

After the war he was a member of the National Congress and in 1946 he was elected to the constituent assembly, the Constituent Assembly. He was then elected to the Camera dei Deputati (= Chamber of Deputies, one of the two chambers of the Italian Parliament) and re-elected via the list of the PCI and remained the second man in his party behind Palmiro Togliatti . After Togliatti's death in 1964, Longo became General Secretary of the PCI. When he was elected, he declared that he was " secretary, not boss ". In this role he followed Togliatti's line, known as the "Italian Road to Socialism," in which ties between the Communist Party of Italy and the Soviet Union became more distant. Longo was against the intervention of the Warsaw Pact states to liquidate the Prague Spring in 1968. He responded to the New Left , which was established in 1968, without hostility. He was one of the PCI's most sought-after speakers in dealing with the new activists, though he did not condone their excesses.

Longo was one of the first to recognize Enrico Berlinguer's abilities , and when he resigned from his post as General Secretary in 1972 because of his poor health, he supported Berlinguer as his successor. From then until his death in 1980 he was honorary chairman of the PCI. He supported Berlinguer's reform course of “unity in diversity” and distancing himself from the Soviet intervention model. In his function as honorary chairman, however, he later declared his opposition to the course of "national solidarity", which the PCI later took as part of the compromesso storico (= " historical compromise ").

In 1947 he published a book called A People in the Maquis .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Antony Beevor, The Spanish Civil War, ISBN 978-3-442-15492-0 , 2nd edition, p. 229.
  2. a b The death of the Duce . In: Der Spiegel . No. 35 , 1996 ( online ).