Armando Cossutta was an Italian communist politician. After World War II, Cossutta became one of the leading members of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), representing the most pro-Soviet Union tendency; his belief in that country as the leading Communist state led him to criticize Enrico Berlinguer. Later in life, although he did not regret the choice he made, Cossutta considered that he was mistaken in opposing Berlinguer.

The Italian Communist Party was a communist and democratic socialist political party in Italy. It was founded in Livorno as the Communist Party of Italy on 21 January 1921, when it seceded from the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), under the leadership of Amadeo Bordiga, Antonio Gramsci, and Nicola Bombacci. Outlawed during the Italian fascist regime, the party continued to operate underground and played a major role in the Italian resistance movement. The party's peaceful and national road to socialism, or the "Italian Road to Socialism", the realisation of the communist project through democracy, repudiating the use of violence and applying the Constitution of Italy in all its parts, a strategy inaugurated under Palmiro Togliatti but that some date back to Gramsci, would become the leitmotif of the party's history.