O PCP e a guerra fria.pdf - RUN UNL - Universidade Nova de Lisboa

there simultaneously existed a national principle – under major or minor tension, but
always present –, both radical and based upon the conviction of development, which
had been absorbed in a republican cultural tradition.
However, the Portuguese Communist Party, irrespective of its drifts,
conjunctions and cultural heritage, would never lose sight of the idea that its policies to
overthrow the regime were subordinated to the dispute for the hegemony of positions, in
order not to be excluded from any solution after toppling the regime.
During all those years, the Portuguese Communist Party was the result of all
these tense forces, on the one hand, which, on the other hand, would frequently collide
with the pulse of the more radical party political and social sectors.
In this chain of very complex and contradictory processes, and after conquering
its intolerant, hard factions, as well as their bases, the Portuguese Communist Party has
always agreed to gather opposing tendencies rather than exclude them or use political
harassment.
But, actually, the Portuguese Communist Party has never significantly
abandoned its Stalinist tradition which was its framework since the party was
restructured in 1940-41 and which allowed it – supported by a group of procedures of a
centralised, hierarchised and compartmentalised character and bound to a thorough and
strict culture of clandestine existence – to resist, the most appropriately they could, but
resist, the continuous and constant police assaults.
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