Armando Cossutta (2 September 1926 – 14 December 2015) was an Italian communist politician. After World War II, Cossutta became one of the leading members of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), representing the most pro-Soviet Union tendency; his belief in that country as the leading Communist state led him to criticize Enrico Berlinguer. Later in life, although he did not regret the choice he made, Cossutta considered that he was mistaken in opposing Berlinguer.
Opposed to Achille Occhetto's 1991 proposal to dissolve the PCI, Cossutta founded, together with Sergio Garavini, Nichi Vendola, and others, the Communist Refoundation Party (PRC), of which he became the president. When Fausto Bertinotti, the PRC leader, voted against a motion of confidence to the 1996 government of Romano Prodi, Cossutta opposed his stance, and left the PRC along with Oliviero Diliberto and others to found the Party of Italian Communists (PdCI). Afterwards, Cossutta was president of the PdCI and a member of the Italian Parliament. He also served as a member of the European Parliament during the Fifth European Parliament term (1999–2004).
Cossutta was targeted for decades by political opponents, including allegations that he personally received Soviet money and of being a KGB spy, both of which had been viewed with scepticism or were dismissed in two parliamentary commissions (one by the centre-right coalition in 2002, the other by the centre-left coalition in 2006) about the Mitrokhin Archive, one of the main sources of the allegations, which was also viewed with scepticism; a Supreme Court of Cassation ruling held that it was defamatory to refer to him as a Soviet spy, and awarded him damages. Cossutta never renounced communism. He never hid or regretted his role, and claimed its legitimacy in a bipolar world, in which all involved parties, from the United States to the Soviet Union, had their international lenders.
Early life and World War II Cossutta was born in Milan into a working-class family that was active in the political reality of the time. His father, originally from Trieste, took part in Gabriele D'Annunzio's takeover of Fiume. Cossutta joined the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in 1943, and took part in the Italian resistance movement as a partisan in the ranks of the Garibaldi Brigades. He was also arrested by the Nazi–fascists and detained for a certain period in the San Vittore Prison in Milan.
Political career Italian Communist Party After World War II, Cossutta became part of the leadership group within the PCI, of which he embodied the more pro-Soviet current, which made him a privileged interlocutor of the Moscow nomenklatura, to which he was a highly esteemed ambassador for the PCI. His tendency to consider the Soviet Union as the leading state of the international Communist movement led him often and willingly to argue with Enrico Berlinguer, especially when the latter came to hold the position of general secretary. In the 1990s, he engaged with some self-criticism with those from the il manifesto group that he expelled from the party in 1969, and accepted some of their objections to his pro-Soviet views; in this sense, Cossutta's pro-Sovietism came from the fear that condemnation would have put an end to any possible alternatives to capitalism, and that rather than representing full support or praise of real socialism, it was a way to keep the party, while respecting liberal democracy, revolutionary and thus maintain the objective and possibility of a post-capitalist, socialist society. About the expulsion of il manifesto members, he said: "But with the rules of the party, expulsion was inevitable."
A collaborator of L'Unità and uninterruptedly a parliamentarian from 1972 to 2008 (first as a senator, then from 1994 to 2006 as a deputy, and then again as a senator), Cossutta held many political positions. He was city councilor in Milan since 1951; he was a municipal and then regional secretary of the PCI (in the first case in Milan, in the second in Lombardy), and was also a member from 1959 of the National Directorate and from 1964 of the National Secretariat. Cossutta's first assignment in the party had been that of city secretary of the PCI in Sesto San Giovanni when he was 19. The left wing of the party represented by Cossutta, named after him (cossuttiana), also consisted of various ex-workerist militants and he himself was close to the demands of their movement, even though he never detached himself from the PCI. He denied or diminished his own faction, and said: "Cossuttismo does not exist, and if it does exist it is only Togliattismo. It means one step after another, realizing the most advanced ideal aspirations in each step. And without unnecessary propaganda. In a word, the PCI. A great and unrepeatable reality. To be rethought, of course, in other forms.
About the 1956 invasion of Hungary, Cossutta recalled: "Of course, it was a tragedy and it was suffering for many, but Togliatti could not have taken a different position. There was the Iron Curtain and it was not we Communists who coined this expression, but Churchill. There was a balance of terror, a minor thing was enough to trigger a disaster." He added: "I was young then and as a Milanese member I shared the party line. The Hungarian Communists were the first to make mistakes." About Cuba and Castroism, Cossutta expressed his hope for a full-democratic system. At the same time, he praised Fidel Castro for the work he did under difficult conditions. He said: "But I don't forget that Castro himself did great things under dramatic conditions, like the 40-year embargo. In 1973 I spent a whole night with him, I brought him the flag of the Oltrepò Garibaldi Brigade as a gift, the one that captured Mussolini. Fidel stayed for hours asking me questions."
During the strategy of tensions and Years of Lead between the 1960s and 1980s, which saw attempted anti-communist, right-wing, or military coups like Piano Solo and Golpe Borghese, Cossutta wrote an editorial in Rinascita directed by Gerardo Chiaromonte, entitled "The Comrades Know", with which he meant to explain what should have happened in the event of a coup or subversion. In 2010, he recalled: "We had in mind the gravity and delicacy of the moment. Thus it was that we revived what had existed since the Liberation, i.e. the mythical 'order service' which had concrete tasks: to defend the headquarters, as the note from the secret services says, the houses of comrades, during demonstrations to avoid infiltrations. Our order service did not allow it."
In 1981, Cossutta opposed the Eurocommunist perspective promoted by Berlinguer, who had stated that the progressive driving force of the October Revolution had run out and that the PCI should have severed its historical relations with the Communist regimes of the Eastern Bloc. Apart from the merits, Cossutta criticized the method by which this political line was arrived at, which he defined as lo strappo (the tear), due to its gestation extraneous to internal discussions and the history of the party itself. Later, without regrets, Cossutta declared that he was wrong in going against Berlinguer. In discussing his never-repent attitude and Pietro Ingrao, he said: "I don't like this sprinkling one's head with ashes, crucify oneself, flogging those who, with hindsight, Pietro believes are their own mistakes and who also end up appearing to be mistakes of the PCI. Repentance has never been my vocation, I don't understand those who feel the need to repent of everything in order to question everything again." He added: "I've made mistakes too. I have many to reproach myself for, I too am ready to take the scourge, the ashes, the hair shirt, but if I think back to the great choices in my eyes they still appear right today."
Communist Refoundation Party With the crisis that hit the PCI in the years of the riflusso (reflux), and the process of self-criticism that it undertook as a result, Cossutta distinguished himself within the internal debate as a firm supporter of the historical identity of the PCI, and thus opposed the more innovative tendencies who then moved under the secretariat of Achille Occhetto and that led to the dissolution of the PCI. The second motion, which was signed by Alessandro Natta and Ingrao, and also included supporters of Berlinguer, supported modernization but was opposed to renouncing Marxism, while the third motion, which was more orthodox and opposed the PCI's dissolution, was led by Cossutta and his supporters; those two motions later unified but were not enough to overcome the Occhetto-led first motion that garnered the majority.
In February 1991, with the establishment of the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS) and the effective dissolution of the PCI, to which Cossutta and a few other members like Sergio Garavini and were opposed, he founded, together with Garavini, Libertini, and other remnants of the old left-wing factions of the PCI, the Movement for the Communist Refoundation (MRC). In December 1991, the MRC was joined by Proletarian Democracy (PDUP) and other minor left-wing parties, and led to the establishment of the Communist Refoundation Party (PRC), of which Cossutta held the position of president from 1992 to 1998 and with which he was elected deputy in 1994. Following the 1996 Italian general election, in which he was re-elected a member of Italy's Chamber of Deputies, the PRC was part of the majority that supported the first Prodi government. As a deputy, he was a member of the Constitutional Affairs Commission (1994–2001), a member of the bicameral Commission for Institutional Reforms (1996–2001), the group leader of the Fourth Defense Commission (2001–2006), and a member of the Committee for Parliamentary Diplomacy (2001–2006).
Party of the Italian Communists In 1998, Fausto Bertinotti, the then secretary of the PRC, withdrew confidence in Romano Prodi's government, and caused its subsequent crisis and fall. Cossutta, who disagreed with this choice and more generally with the political profile assumed by Bertinotti, decided to detach himself from the party and to found, together with other exiles close to his own area, such as Oliviero Diliberto and Marco Rizzo, the Party of Italian Communists (PdCI); it is recounted that Cossutta did so through a fax sent by Pro Loco di Bonassola, near La Spezia. The PdCI participated to the subsequent birth of the first D'Alema government. Cossutta then held the office of president of the PdCI and senator. About this, he said that he did it "in the interest of the country". In 2000, he participated, along with other politicians like Walter Veltroni, at the Gay Pride in Rome, where he took the opportunity to demonstrate his position in favour of same-sex marriage. Going back to the World War II years, as well as the fall of Prodi's government and the establishment of a new one led by Massimo D'Alema, he said: "I fought fascism, I determined the survival of a communist force after the end of the PCI, I served a split to save the first left-wing government in the history of Italy. And if after Prodi's fall we had gone to the polls, my party would have taken off and Bertinotti's would have almost disappeared. However, the right would have won and Berlusconi would have gone up to the Quirinale. Hence my sacrifice."