CARRISTI

In the argot of political journalism, the carristi are those who endorsed the use by the Soviet Union of armored vehicles (carri armati) to put down the Hungarian uprisings of October 1956, or who advocated a rigid pro-Soviet line toward Czechoslovak attempts at reform under Dubcek—in short, the most Stalinist elements of the former Partito Comunista Italiano/Italian Communist Party (PCI). The term was also applied to “Kabulisti” (those who applauded Soviet intervention in Afghanistan). Within the PCI, the carristiwere in the majority in 1956, when the 8th Congress of the PCI in December 1956 backed the Soviet Union’s action despite fierce internal dissension and the walkout of many leading intellectuals, most notably the historian Furio Diaz and Antonio Giolitti. In August 1968, by contrast, the PCI officially denounced Soviet repression in Prague, calling it “an unjust decision” that could not be “reconciled with the principle that each communist party and every socialist state has a right to autonomy and independence.” There were, nevertheless, many hardliners within the party who disapproved of the increasing criticism leveled at the USSR by the PCI’s leaders, especially Enrico Berlinguer, in the 1970s.