Relations between the Italian Communist Party and the USSR gradually deteriorated after 1975, and reached a near break-up in 1982 after the Polish crisis. It was the PCI's conception and promotion of a European international order adapted to the success requirements of its internal strategy that determined and structured the deterioration of its relations with the USSR, notably by amplifying and lending more cohesion to certain tendencies which had existed previously. The process then acquired its own dynamics. Following the identity crisis that the PCI underwent largely as a result of the crisis in its relations with the USSR, these relations have displayed a two-fold evolution. Since Gorbachev's accession to power, these relations, whethe...