CWIHP is pleased to announce the publication of the latest addition to the CWIHP Book Series: Stalin and Togliatti: Italy and the Origins of the Cold War by Elena Agarossi and Victor Zaslavsky.

Agarossi and Zaslavsky employ previously classified documents in Russian and Italian archives, including reports to Stalin on the virtually daily meetings of Palmiro Togliatti, head of the Italian Communist Party, with Soviet diplomats. This recent, post-revisionist scholarship underscores the role of Stalin's ambitions and their incompatibility with liberal-democratic systems in the development of the Cold War. Stalin and Togliatti come out as shrewd politicians, implacable enemies of the capitalist West, yet acutely aware of the limits of their power.

Stalin and Togliatti is a translation and expansion of a prizewinning book published in Italian in 1997 and updated in 2007.

Elena Agarossi is professor of contemporary history at the Scuola Superiore di Pubblica Amministrazione in Rome and member of the Wilson Center European Alumni Association.

Victor Zaslavsky, who died late in 2009, was professor of political sociology at the Free International University for Social Sciences in Rome.
 

Comments on this book:

"The book has a sense of history in the making: it combines at times gripping narrative with sober synopses of complicated and controversial policies." —Carl Levy, Department of Politics, University of London

"The scholarship that went into this work is analytically excellent and rigorous, and superior to anything that exists on the connections between Italian communists and Moscow in the English-language historiography."—Vladislav Zubok, Temple University


Read more about the Cold War International History Project Book Series

Order this book from Stanford University Press.