The International Newsletter of Communist Studies Online IX

The International Newsletter of Communist Studies Online 16/2003 30
Unsurprisingly, this aspect of the activity of the Third International was selected at the same time as a central
objective of study by historians creating another historiography, which we might name the »anti-Stalinist« one.
After the end of World War II a lot of fundamental works were published (Victor Alba, Robert J. Alexander, Boris
Goldenberg, and later – Manuel Caballero). One of the basic ideas of these studies were the paths of
penetration of communism – both in theory and practical activity of the Latin American communists – from
Moscow and through the efforts of the Comintern representatives. The most vulnerable point of these studies,
though, was the lack of empirical proofs of what such penetration-processes were. As the doyen of this sector
of historiography Robert J. Alexander had self-critically written, this means the fact that the historians were
compelled to base their studies on »assumptions and guesses«. 11 Though in many respects these studies were
quite valid and were extensively supported by memoirs and interviews, their insufficient documentary evidence
gave to many Marxist opponents of »anticommunist and renegade« historiography the possibility to confirm
that the work done by their ideological adversaries in the West was determined by some kind of idée fixe, the
assumption of a kind of »unnaturalness«»innaturality« of communism for the New World, that was deliberately
brought into Latin America by »external forces«. 12
The absence of original documents about Latin-American communism was due not only to the existing
censorship in the USSR which put obstacles for the access to the Comintern archive in Moscow (and also
interfered with the publication of the documentary sources). Simultaneously the lack of information was
caused by other objective reasons. The majority of the communist parties of Latin America had to work in
conditions of severe governmental persecution, sometimes they had to act in deep underground and
consequently they were unable to keep their own archives. Some of the parties disappeared as a result of
reprisals and were sometimes revived again with other leaders (for example, the communist parties of
Paraguay, Guatemala and Bolivia). Frequently the new generation of communist militants simply knew nothing
about the activity of their predecessors. In the same measure the governmental and police archives of the Latin
American countries were poorly accessible for unofficial consultation though this access would have given the
possibility to look at the history of the communist parties from other points of view. 13
The situation has changed sharply in the 1990s. With the collapse of the USSR and the CPSU the new
authorities of the Russian Federation have opened the archives for investigation, and this massive amount of
documentation includes also the collection of the Comintern documents stored in the Russian State Archive of
11 During a long time many historians were referring to E. Ravines’ memoirs «The Yennan way« (which are not
absolutely reliable); this book was practically an exclusive source for description of the mechanism of
functioning of the Comintern’s supreme bodies in Moscow and of the South American Secretariat of the ECCI in
Buenos Aires and Montevideo.
12 Among the most fruitful studies of the Latin American Communism made by the Soviet Marxists we should
name first of all the works by A. Zorina, V. Ermolaev, S. Semenov, B. Koval and A. Shulgovsky that were
published during the 1940s – 1980s.
13 An exception is the collection of documents of the Communist Party «Libro Rojo« published by the
Venezuelan government already in the 1930s, yet it should be noted that the originally planned goal of
«disclosure of subversive communist activity« and marked tendentiousness in selection of materials decrease
seriously the scientific significance of the book.