The two men had first met in 1972, when Gorbachev, then the second-ranking Soviet Communist leader, was in Turin with his wife, Raisa, as guests at the Festa nazionale de l’Unità (a traditional annual mass gathering of Italian Communists). Gorbachev asked the city’s PCI leader, Adalberto Minucci, with whom he had become friends, if he could personally meet Berlinguer and have a face-to-face conversation with him. “Because” — he explained, according to Berlinguer biographer Chiara Valentini — “I was very impressed, on a human level, by the courage he showed in Moscow in 1969. In his speech he said things that until then had never been heard uttered in public.” The two men met and spoke for almost an hour. According to Minucci, Berlinguer showed interest and sympathy for this young Russian Communist so different from the norm.

Berlinguer’s relations with Communists in the Soviet Union had almost always been contentious, especially after the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. Already then, he had proposed that the PCI not only radically distance itself from the invasion (as did much of the party’s leadership) but from the Soviet Union per se. Berlinguer strongly distrusted the USSR’s ability to reform and become more democratic. In June 1969, newly elected as the PCI’s deputy leader (he would become its secretary — i.e., main leader — three years later), Berlinguer had attended the Third International Conference of Communist Parties in Moscow. His critical speech had resonated throughout the world: for the first time since the great debates of the 1920s, and in an international forum of communists, a Communist party had advanced an alternative proposal to the Soviet one, reiterating its condemnation of the Prague invasion. This position had evidently impressed Gorbachev.