The text revisits a speech made in the Italian Chamber of Deputies, marking the first circumstances, in 1974 and in 1976, when Enrico Berlinguer defined the moral question as the main political question to be resolved at once in order to put an end to Italy's crisis and decline. The essay then reconstructs the politics of independence from the Ussr, which increased from 1968 to 1981-82, and the evolution of the model of Italian Communism, which Berlinguer identified with a party of Socialist Democracy.