"Only Sentimental Importance"

Back in 1948, the year Czechoslovakia lost its freedom, some of Europe's intellectual Communists got cinders in their starry eyes, but Antonio Giolitti just blinked. To a friend troubled by Soviet tyranny he wrote: "Don't lose your spirit. Remember, liberty is not everything." Slim and younger looking than his 42 years, Antonio Giolitti bears one of Italy's biggest political names. His Liberal grandfather was five times Premier of pre-Mussolini Italy, and it is still remembered that "under Giolitti 100 lire in paper was worth 101 in gold." Young Antonio, brought up under Fascism, became a Communist in 1940, organized the famed partisan Garibaldi division during the war, was badly wounded fighting in his native Piedmont mountains. Trading on his war record (and his grandfather's name), he was a great vote-getter and a comer in Communist politics. "Piedmont always votes for Giolitti," said the Communist posters, and the Piedmont did.

Last year, after Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin, Giolitti wrote a manifesto demanding party independence from Moscow, and a pledge that the party would seek power democratically and would give up power if democratically defeated. "You can't change the Communist Party by leaving it," Giolitti told his friends. "I want to fight this out openly and honestly within the party." Aware of Giolitti's prestige. Italian Red Boss Palmiro Togliatti responded gingerly. Sitting behind him on the platform at the national Party Congress last December, Togliatti yawned when Giolitti openly demanded that "if the men who now lead are incapable of changing, we must change leaders." Said Togliatti later: "Giolitti believes in miracles.'' But when Giolitti recently carried his writings and his warnings into a monthly published by expelled Communists, Togliatti ordered a more open attack on him: "It is inadmissible that Giolitti should keep agitating about last year's events in Hungary, which now have only sentimental importance."

Last week Togliatti summoned Giolitti to Rome for disciplining. But. his starry eyes opened at last. Antonio Giolitti stuck to his grandfather's mansion and chose liberty. Unable to change the party, he left it.

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