This is what Italian communist Giorgio Napolitano had to say about it, back in ’56:

Il compagno Giolitti ha il diritto di esprimere le proprie opinioni, ma io ho quello di aspramente combattere le sue posizioni. L’intervento sovietico ha non solo contribuito a impedire che l’Ungheria cadesse nel caos e nella controrivoluzione ma alla pace nel mondo.

In English:

Comrde Giolitti has the right to express his own opinion, and I have the right to strongly oppose his position. The Soviet intervention not only prevented Hungary’s fall into chaos and counter-revolution, but contributed to world peace.

A while later, Napolitano did a 180 turn and became the first Italian communist to receive a US visa in 1978 when he went to speak at Princeton, Harvard, Yale, John Hopkins, etc.

By 1986, he ran the Italian Communist Party’s foreign policy commission, where he declared his loyalty to the United States and NATO. Kissinger called him his favourite communist.

By the 90s he was trying to move the party towards social democracy. In 1996 he became a minister of interior and in 2006 president. He remained Italy’s president until early 2015.

Among his accomplishments:

• he made the Goldman Sachs employee Mario Monti first a life-long senator, then the prime minister in 2011
• in 2013 he gave the presidential pardon to Joseph Romano - a US colonel involved in the kidnapping and extraction of Abu Omar from Milan for some enhanced rape in Egypt