From “Supremacy” to “Extinction”. The Italian Communist Historiography and the Narratives on 1989

In the great reconstructions of the history of the Italian Communist Party produced between 1989 and 1999, the great social-democratic transformation of Italian communism appears almost like the ‘ghost’ that Michel Foucault spoke about. The issue has simply been avoided in many cases, and in others it has barely been mentioned, focusing instead on the 1970s, the apogee of approval for Italian Communism. Above all, the main ICP history texts have, starting from 1979, talked of a history ‘in decline’, ‘on the way down’, of ‘failure’, and especially of ‘crisis’. This latter, a truly dominant discursive and cultural register of those years, was, after all, the underlying current running through the investigations which, only touching upon the great upheavals of the Soviet system in Central and Eastern Europe, had Italian society and politics as their main (if not only) analytical horizon. This essay will retrace these narrative paths, analysing the main historiography on the ICP published in the decade 1989-1999, but also taking into account the early 2000s, so as to record the arrival of new paradigms.