La Revolución Rusa y América Latina: 1917 y más allá

Abstract

The Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 and the consolidation of Soviet power had a transformative impact on the twentieth century. Not only did the emergence of the world's first socialist state profoundly alter the destinies of the vast territories that became the Soviet Union, but it also reshaped the global political map, establishing a systemic alternative to capitalism that drew attentions and loyalties—as well as vehement rejections—across the world. This volume edited by Carlos Miguel Herrera and Eugenia Palieraki traces some of the repercussions of the Russian Revolution in Latin America, a region that already possessed its own revolutionary traditions and that by 1917–18 was witnessing its own ferment of radicalism and insurgency from below, typified by the Mexican Revolution and the Argentine university reform movement. Within this charged context, even though events in Petrograd and Moscow were physically distant, they had a direct impact on Latin America's political landscape. As Omar Acha puts it in his afterword to the volume, the Russian Revolution “affected the configuration of the entire ideological spectrum,” such that the process of “determining what the Left was and what its attributes were was no longer the same” (p. 306). In that sense, the Russian Revolution was an ideological and political watershed not only for the Latin American Left but implicitly for the political life of the region as a whole, with consequences that continued to resonate throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.The book is organized into two sections, the first—under the rubric “years of mutual discovery”—addressing the early impacts of the Russian Revolution in the Latin America of the 1920s and 1930s, and the second devoted to the Cold War era and beyond. Hernán Camarero's and Carlos Miguel Herrera's chapters both describe how the Russian Revolution reconfigured the politics of the Argentine Left. The Argentine Communist Party was among the first to form in Latin America, building on an already extant socialist movement with strong anarchist influences. Camarero recounts its early vicissitudes and the increasingly close alignment of the party's leadership with a steadily more Stalinized Communist International in Moscow, while Herrera describes the broader debates and strategic divergences that the advent of communism occasioned within the Argentine socialist movement more broadly, showing how closely non-Communists engaged with the Soviet example, whether as model or warning. Sergio Grez Toso's chapter, meanwhile, highlights the unusual case of the Chilean Communist Party, which was also among the continent's earliest and which maintained an unusual degree of organizational and ideological independence from Moscow through most of the 1920s, only to come increasingly under its sway—mediated through envoys from the Argentine Communist Party—in the wake of domestic repression. Víctor Jeifets's chapter charts the evolution of the Comintern's views of Mexico and the resulting strategic zigzags for the country's Communist Party. While the Soviet Union and Mexico initially saw each other as fellow postrevolutionary regimes, animosities gradually mounted, culminating in the Communists' denunciation of the Mexican government as “social fascist,” in line with the broader sectarian tenor of the Third Period (1928–35). Here too, the picture is one of a gradual subordination of the Mexican party's line to the centralized demands of the Comintern.If the essays in the book's first part for the most part focus closely on Communist parties, those in the second part adopt slightly broader perspectives. Echoing Herrera's chapter on the Argentine Left, Alfredo Riquelme Segovia tracks the centrality of the USSR as a reference point for the Chilean Left. Particularly significant here is the broadly pro-Soviet orientation of both the Chilean Communist and Socialist Parties—both of whom also sought to defend the idea of a democratic path to power, culminating in the alliance that brought Salvador Allende to power in 1970. Rafael Pedemonte's chapter addresses the dramatic rupture in Latin American political debates caused by the Cuban Revolution, using the tense triangular relation between Chilean Communists, Cubans, and Soviets in the 1960s and 1970s to explore broader contentions over revolutionary strategy. Alfonso Salgado Muñoz, though likewise centered on Chile, deals with a different set of tensions, between the political commitments of Communist militants and their personal lives. Maud Chirio's chapter on “anticommunism without communism” in Brazil closes the section, describing the persistence of Cold War motifs in right-wing discourse long after the disappearance of any organized Communist movement that might embody them.Any edited volume, of course, involves difficult choices over what to include and exclude. Nevertheless, the space allocated to the Chilean Communist Party—four out of eight chapters—may strike some readers as disproportionate, raising questions about how representative of the broader Communist movement this specific case is intended to be; yet the argument behind the selection remains unclear. Despite this imbalance, however, the essays provide well-grounded insights into several of Latin America's Communist parties, helping to nuance our understanding of their trajectories. They also highlight new historiographical areas to explore, especially the transnational and experiential dimensions of militancy, and offer a sound platform on which further contributions can build.