Luigi Longo - Early Life

Early Life

Luigi Longo was born in Fubine, in the province of Alessandria, Piedmont.

As a student at the Politecnico di Torino, he became active in the youth wing of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), and engaged in political propaganda from a Marxist perspective. He was a regular visitor to the offices of Ordine Nuovo, the newspaper founded by Antonio Gramsci, and became acquainted with Gramsci and Palmiro Togliatti. In 1921, at the Livorno Congress of the PSI, he was one of the instigators of the split in the party, when supporters of Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik line left to form the Italian Communist Party (PCI). He became a leading figure in the new PCI along with Togliatti, Gramsci and others.

Longo was a fervent anti-fascist, and, when Benito Mussolini established his Fascist regime in Italy in 1922, he emigrated to France where he became one of the principal leaders of the PCI. In the same year he was a member of a delegation to the Comintern Congress in Moscow, where he met Lenin. He would return to Moscow several times in the years to come, with a specific expertise in political ideology, and was to meet Joseph Stalin and other members of the Soviet Union leadership. In 1933 he became a member of the Comintern's political commission. In 1934 he signed a joint action agreement between the PCI and the PSI.