Luigi Longo

Luigi Longo
General Secretary of the Italian Communist Party
In office 22 August 1964 – 16 March 1972
Preceded by	Palmiro Togliatti
Succeeded by	Enrico Berlinguer
Member of the Chamber of Deputies
In office 25 June 1946 – 16 October 1980
Constituency	Milan
Personal details
Born	15 March 1900 Alessandria, Italy
Died	16 October 1980(1980-10-16) (aged 80) Rome, Italy
Nationality	Italian
Political party	Communist Party (1921–1980) Socialist Party (before 1921)

Luigi Longo (15 March 1900 – 16 October 1980), also known as Gallo, was an Italian communist politician and secretary of the Italian Communist Party from 1964 to 1972.

Luigi Longo was born in Fubine, in the province of Alessandria, Piedmont.

As a student at the Politecnico di Torino, he became active in the youth wing of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), and engaged in political propaganda from a Marxist perspective. He was a regular visitor to the offices of Ordine Nuovo, the newspaper founded by Antonio Gramsci, and became acquainted with Gramsci and Palmiro Togliatti. In 1921, at the Livorno Congress of the PSI, he was one of the instigators of the split in the party, when supporters of Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik line left to form the Italian Communist Party (PCI). He became a leading figure in the new PCI along with Togliatti, Gramsci and others.

Longo was a fervent anti-fascist, and, when Benito Mussolini established his Fascist regime in Italy in 1922, he emigrated to France where he became one of the principal leaders of the PCI. In the same year he was a member of a delegation to the Comintern Congress in Moscow, where he met Lenin. He would return to Moscow several times in the years to come, with a specific expertise in political ideology, and was to meet Joseph Stalin and other members of the Soviet Union leadership. In 1933 he became a member of the Comintern's political commission. In 1934 he signed a joint action agreement between the PCI and the PSI.

...
Wikipedia