After the fascist take‐over Togliatti lived mainly in Moscow (1926–44) and became chief of the Comintern in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. After World War II he made the Italian Communist Party the largest in Western Europe. Togliatti was undogmatic in his communism: he recognized Roman Catholicism as the state religion of Italy and propounded the doctrine of “polycentrism”, which advocates the existence of several ideologies within a political system. The Russian city of Stavropol on the Volga was renamed Togliatti in his honour in 1964.