Week 30
Italy in the 1990s was a decade of total transformation. It begins with the fall of the Soviet Union. The collapse of the USSR had immediate, massive implications for Italy since the Italian Communist Party had always been the #2 party of the country. And in many regions (The Red Triangle) and cities it was the #1 party with immense political power. Events in Moscow in 1991 reverberated into Italy immediately and ripped off all the positive images of productive partnership between the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and its Soviet Communist partners. The most important one for Italy was the revelation out of Moscow that the supposedly independent Italian Communist Party was really the puppet of the Soviet Communist party in every detail. The supposedly independent leader of the Italian Communist Party, Enrico Berlinguer (1922–1984), one of the most admired men in Italy, was now revealed to be totally controlled from Moscow. Dozens of secret trips of Berlingher to Moscow were revealed when the USSR archives were opened to scholars by Boris Yeltsin. Massive amounts of USSR cash for the Italian Communist Party was documented in the archival records. The result of all of these Russian revelations was the total collapse of the Italian Communist Party overnight. One of the two most powerful political parties just disappeared overnight. Meetings were canceled, rented space was emptied, documents were burned. But then, almost as if in some brilliant political movie, the other most powerful political party, the Christian Democratic Party was also destroyed. Within just a few years, the entire Italian political structure was overturned when a Milanese prosecutor began digging into a small bribery case and then it just reverberated on and on and on until the five major parties, the Pentipartito, were all destroyed. All the parties had been receiving secret money, bribes, and payoffs. All of them. Former Prime Ministers were indicted. One on the verge of going to jail, escaped from Italy and went to Libya. The whole decade was one shock after another. But by 2000, Italy was rebuilding stronger than ever, a conditioned which was registered in its adoption of the Euro and the integration of the Italian economy into the fully unified European EEU.
