The International Newsletter of Communist Studies Online IX

The International Newsletter of Communist Studies Online 16/2003 29
opinions and estimations about the newly founded movement and the arising number of supporters of the
Comintern. There is no doubt that these were persons who were directly involved with the situation that they
were examining. Therefore, the first books on the history of Latin American Communism (such as »Pugnas de la
gleba« by Rosendo Salazar and »Relatorio de Delegacia a Russia« by A.B. Canellas) have up until now been an
important ressource for researchers as a reliable and well-documented base for studies. 10
The first attempts of a methodical analysis of the history of Latin American Communism from the Marxist point
of view were undertaken inside the very Comintern structures at the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the
1930s. However, already the first studies made by Stanislav Pestkovsky (»A. Volsky«, »S.Ortega«), Georgiy Skalov
(»Sinani«), Genrich Yakobson (»G. Ya-n«), August Guralsky, Maurice Chaskin and Vladimir Miroshevsky, despite
all their worthiness, suffered from one serious deficiency, which subsequently for a long time became the
Achilles heel of the Marxist historiography of the Third International. While examining the socio-economic and
political development of Latin America and analyzing the genesis of Latin American Communism, the Marxist
historians carefully bypassed the major question: to what extend and in what forms had the Third International
participated in the formation of communist parties in New World. It was to some extent a paradox as this very
issue was the problem they knew best. All of these authors were working in the Latin American Country-
Secretariat of the ECCI and it was they who were coordinating, for the »General staff of world revolution«, the
activity of the communist parties of the continent from the Moscow headquarters of the Comintern. The
reasons for this attitude were mainly due to the interest which arose about Latin American Communism in the
USSR which coincided with the beginning of a new stage (Stalin’s) of Comintern activity. Many of the facts
which had been freely discussed before, even by the international communist media (»The Communist
International«, »Inprekorr«, »The Red International of the Trade Unions«), and especially in Latin American
»La Correspondencia Sudamericana«, the 1920s, became taboo from this moment onwards. Culminating in
the Stalinization-process of international communism, the Marxist researchers of communism became more
and more reduced to the analysis of the struggle against »opportunism« and »revisionism« inside the
communist movement. The organizational part of the Communist Party’s, always remained behind the
framework of these studies. Thus the major consideration was ignored as it was simply impossible to analyze
and describe the history of the »world communist party« (the Third International) – not only on the regional
and peripheral level – without dealing with the investigation of the functioning of its organizational structure.
This is the condition sine qua non in order to study the mechanism of interaction between the supreme bodies
of the Comintern and its national sections.
10 Many years ago, one of the authors of this review (Lazar Kheyfetz) was quite surprised by the «unlimited
fantasies« of R. Salazar describing in his book the activity of a mysterious Russian agent in Mexico named
«Natasha Michaelova« in 1920 (!); this fact led L. Kheyfetz to doubt about some other parts of Salazar’s study.
And only after some years had passed, after reading the memoirs written by Manuel Gomez (Charles Phillips)
and thanks to a scrupulous research of the Comintern archive documents which contain information about
Gomez’ wife, Natalia Michailova, and her life in Mexico, the Russian historian got a chance to realize finally
how precise R. Salazar was when he describedsome events of the first years of Mexican Communism.