BRUNO GROPPO

Memorialistica e storiografia sul PCI.  Interpretazioni e problemi 

N. 1/1985

Summary — Till the 50s the historiography on the Italian Communist Party is an official party historiography that obeys to essentially political criteria. Produced not by professional historians but by leaders of the party, who exercise a real monopoly of the historical word, it has the function to legitimate the decisions taken by the leading group and to strengthen the idealogical cohesion of the militants. The events which contrast with the official version and with its essential postulate — the absolute continuity of the party’s history — are concealed or deliberately falsified.

Pedagogical and teleological, this party historiography, elaborated between the end of the 40s and the beginning of the 50s, comes to a crisis under the spur of various factors: the crisis of Stalinism, in the first place, which compels the PCI leaders to re-examine their positions and to seek new ways of legitimation; the end of the historical monopoly, thanks to the intervention of non-communist personages and scholars who oppose the official version of PCI’s history; finally, the rising of a new generation of professional historians, communist and non, who begin to study the events of the Italian Communism on the basis of essentially scientific criteria.

 Thus, a scientific historiography of PCI develops in the course of the 60s, of which the Storia del Partito Comunista Italiano, by Paolo Spriano represents the most significative example. The giving up by PCI to produce an official history of the party and the placing at the disposal of the scholars its archives, independently from their political creed, have had a positive influence on such evolution.