Togliatti appointed him to the national secretariat of the Communist Organisation for Youth (FGCI). As a secretary of the FGCI, Berlinguer at one point presented Maria Goretti as an example for activists. He was soon sent to Milan, and he was appointed to the Central Committee as a member in 1945. In 1946, Togliatti became the national secretary (the highest political position) of the PCI and called Berlinguer to Rome, where his talents let him enter the national leadership only two years later (at the age of 26, one of the youngest members ever admitted). In 1949, he was named national secretary of the FGCI, a post he held until 1956. The following year in 1950, he became president of the World Federation of Democratic Youth, an international anti-fascist youth organisation. In 1957, Berlinguer, as a member of the central school of the PCI, abolished the obligatory visit to the Soviet Union, including political training there, that until then had been necessary for admission to the highest positions in the PCI. Secretary of the Communist Party Berlinguer's career was obviously carrying him towards the highest positions in the party. After having held many responsible posts, in 1968 he was elected a deputy for the first time for the electoral district of Rome. The following year, he was elected deputy national secretary of the party (the secretary being Luigi Longo). In this role, he took part in the 1969 international conference of the communist parties in Moscow, where his delegation disagreed with the "official" political line and refused to support the final report. Berlinguer's unexpected stance made waves: he gave the strongest speech by a major communist leader ever heard in Moscow. He refused to "excommunicate" the Chinese communists and directly told Leonid Brezhnev that the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact countries (which he termed the "tragedy in Prague") had made clear the considerable differences within the communist movement on fundamental questions such as national sovereignty, socialist democracy and the freedom of culture. Already a prominent leader in the party, Berlinguer was elected to the position of national secretary in 1972 when Luigi Longo resigned on grounds of ill health. In 1973, having been hospitalized after a car accident during a visit to Bulgaria (now widely considered an attempt on his life on orders from Moscow), Berlinguer wrote three famous articles ("Reflections on Italy", "After the facts of Chile"