Both the cause of the freeze and the cause of its thaw must be understood, and that is largely the story of the Italian Communist Party (PCI)’s own long march, a march of fewer bunions, but more twists than the trek of their Chinese comrades. We sketched (we’ll come back to it later for a deepening) the role of the Communists just before and during World War II.

Better organized and seemingly more determined than all other groups, they grabbed the spotlight of the partisan movement of the North, especially during the war’s final 18 months. The northern cells had the time to do this because the Allied invasion had ground to a halt halfway up the peninsula.
So the PCI emerged from the war flexing its muscles, rich in both new and old membership, and bearing the coloration of Italian patriotism. The pieces were in place for its post-war role as the largest Communist movement outside the Communist bloc.
But it was still a movement, not a party. How it transformed itself will be explored next week. For today’s consideration, the important element was the large numbers of Italians, encouraged by the Church, who remained unconvinced by the new party. They still saw a Moscow-guided (and therefore non-Italian), dangerous revolutionary movement, and as the Cold War took shape they felt confirmed in this view.
This was the key. For many Italians, no matter how dissatisfied with their government or their party, crossing over to the Communist side was unthinkable. It would have been not only a vote for an alien force, but a betrayal of the West in its grand struggle with the Communist bloc. Their votes may have been available to slide among the smaller lay parties and the “currents” of the Christian Democratic Party. But they were not available for the kinds of big leftward moves that were making elections exciting in other Western countries.
In the mid-1970s, a false thaw of this political iceberg flickered to life briefly: there appeared to be a little more movement in the electoral totals of some of the parties, leading to the idea of the historic compromise (basically, in many variations, a Christian Democratic-Communist accord for governing Italy—this is for later examination). But subsequent research has shown that this was largely voter movement within the major groupings as voters reacted strongly to the idea of the compromise (which, in the newspaper jargon of the time, would have brought the Communist Party into the “control room” of Italian government), an idea that was anathema (“sell-out”) to many Communist militants and anathema (“pact with the Devil”) to many non-Communists. They showed their support or opposition by moving to splinters, to other parties in the same ideological area, to other currents of the same party. The thaw had not come.
But even this much stirring was the product of the Communists’ advance toward becoming (or at least being seen as) a “normal” party. That momentous, defining accomplishment was the product of the most important airplane flight in modern Italian history, which was not the crash of Enrico Mattei or the mystery of Ustica, but a flight from Moscow that roved, with great difficulty, through strange airports in distant countries, before landing safely in Naples. We must follow that flight next week.