Cool Dish

"Revenge," Italy's late King Victor Emmanuel III once said, "is a dish that should be eaten cold." Palmiro Togliatti, kingpin of Italy's Communists, followed this royal precept last week when it came time to punish a rebel in his court.

The offender was Comrade Pietro Secchia, the party's deputy secretary general and one of Togliatti's two topmost lieutenants. As chief of the party's organizational apparatus, and the late Lavrenty Beria's representative in Italy, Moscow-trained Comrade Secchia had long possessed authority, secret dossiers and generous allocations of funds with which to build a personal machine within the party. But at the national party conference a fortnight ago, he rashly got himself identified with party diehards, who want to discard Palmiro Togliatti's "soft" policy for tough methods (TIME, Jan. 24). Because Moscow has decreed there should be no public quarrel now, Comrade Togliatti waited his chance to serve a cold dish to Pietro Secchia.

Last week L'Unita, the party journal, published a simple, two-column box announcing that Togliatti had been confirmed as secretary general, and Comrade Luigi Longo as deputy secretary general. At the bottom of the list, after describing all other members of the national politburo, came this line: "Comrade Pietro

Secchia has been named to fill the post of regional secretary of the party for Lombardy."

Lombardy, which includes industrial Milan, is one of the citadels of Communist Party strength (some 340,000 of the total claimed Italian membership of 2,500,000). A recent drop in party membership there, and a more serious decline of 75,000 membership in Lombardy's Red-run trade unions, shows the need for a tough, driving organizer of Secchia's caliber. But it is also the kind of job in which an out-of-favor Communist can be made to look bad. If the Communists intended to honor Secchia with the appointment, they would hardly have removed him as deputy secretary general or taken him off the politburo. "Secchia will have an office in which to read his papers, but that's about all he'll have," guessed one ex-Communist labor leader.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.