Lucio Magri: The Tailor of Ulm: Communism in the Twentieth Century (2009/2011)

A fascinating analysis and account of the decline and fall of Western communism by a participant observer.

Twenty years have passed since the Italian Communists’ last Congress in 1991, in which the death of their party was decreed. It was a deliberate death, accelerated by the desire for a “new beginning.” That new beginning never came, and the world lost an invaluable, complex political, organizational and theoretical heritage.

In this detailed and probing work, Lucio Magri, one of the towering intellectual figures of the Italian Left, assesses the causes for the demise of what was once one of the most powerful and vibrant communist parties of the West. The PCI marked almost a century of Italian history, from its founding in 1921 to the partisan resistance, the turning point of Salerno in 1944 to the de-Stalinization of 1956, the long ’68 to the “historic compromise,” and to the opportunity—missed forever—of democratic transformation.

With rigor and passion, The Tailor of Ulm merges an original and enlightening interpretation of Italian communism with the experience of a militant “heretic” into a riveting read—capable of broadening our insights into contemporary Italy, and the twentieth-century communist experience.

First published as Il Sarto di Ulm, il Saggiatore SPA, Milan, 2009
Translated by Patrick Camiller
Publisher Verso, 2011
ISBN 1844676986, 9781844676989
434 pages

review (Donald Sassoon, The Observer)
review (John Green, review31)

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