Palmiro Togliatti was born in Genoa, Italy, in 1893, and died in 1964. He had led the Italian Communist Party since 1927, and was a member of the Executive of the Communist International from 1927 to 1943. One million people marched in his funeral procession.
The understanding and defeat of fascism was central to Togliatti's work. He never forgave those intellectuals who shunned the struggle against fascism in favor of the quiet life of the academy. In 1955 he wrote: "It is not from the 'masters' of liberalism that we learned what is freedom, how to acquire it, how to defend it. This is the lesson we learned when we saw the burning homes of workers and peasants who wanted to live like men. The 'masters' of liberalism remained silent then, they did not protest, maybe they even quietly applauded."
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