Between Social Democracies and Perestroika. The Italian Communist Party’s International Relations in Alessandro Natta’s Papers (1984-1988)

This essay reconstructs the foreign policy of the Italian Communist Party during the four years of Alessandro Natta’s secretariat (1984-1988) through largely original archival documentation, from the Alessandro Natta Fonds of the Historical Archive of the Chamber of Deputies. Natta’s papers are also cross-referenced with those kept in the PCI Archive at the Gramsci Foundation. The author analyses the relationship that the PCI establishes with Gorbachev’s Perestroika, Deng’s China, and European social democracies during the last years of the Cold War