ABSTRACT
By the mid-1980s, the Italian Communist Party's (PCI) Eurocommunist vision had been discarded in favor of the prospect of an integrated European left, or "Euroleft." The transition from Eurocommunism to Euroleft was facilitated by the death of the PCI's general secretary Enrico Berlinguer, who had come to personify both the former and growing influence of activists on party policy. The PCI had sought since the late 1960s to distance itself from the legacy of Stalinism by championing the cause of democratic reform in Eastern Europe, in the Soviet Union, and in the world communist movement at large. The Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia and Soviet-orchestrated suppression of the Prague Spring triggered a fundamental change in the PCI's conduct toward Eastern Europe. PCI support for communist reformism—which a decade later would be called perestroika and glasnost—was prompted by political developments in Poland and Czechoslovakia following the East Berlin summit.
