Fascist arrests hollowed out the PCI leadership, forcing exile-based recomposition

Evidence

Now Bordiga and Grieco had been arrested, and Fortichiari—who was responsible for the party’s illegal organisation—went to Moscow to discuss how best to organise resistance to the fascist regime. Terracini was left as the de facto leader of the party within Italy, and, at the Comintern’s suggestion, he now co-opted Togliatti and Scoccimarro onto a new provisional executive, and Tasca onto the Central Committee; the latter was then sent to Paris to organise the Italian emigre community there (there were 45,000 Italian emigre workers in France in 1921; 200,000 in 1924; over 450,000 by 1926). — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 139

Categorization

• XREF: Quantifies the Italian emigration surge that later shapes Gramsci’s thinking on subaltern and national questions — relevant to the reader’s toolkit on imagined communities.