5 Desk revolutionaries: Soviet Latin

Americanists and internationalism in the late

Soviet Union

In Soviet times, we entered academia like people used to enter convents: in

order to get a maximum distance from the demands and vicissitudes of political
and social life. It was not completely safe, but it was indeed a sanctuary.
Nikolaj Leonov1

We wanted to do things completely differently.

Sergo Mikojan2

Between ‘gorillas’ and guerrillas: Soviet area studies in

the Cold War
Soviet internationalism after Stalin had its high point around 1960, when
both the upper echelons of the CPSU and the majority of the Soviet
artistic and literary intelligentsia revelled in the global prospects of a de-
Stalinised socialism. In the aftermath of the Cuban Crisis, and especially
with Brezhnev and Kosygin in power from 1964, romanticism disap-
peared from political decision making. Nor did most cultural figures still
idealise 1920s socialist art and internationalism. Their hopes for the
reforms of the Thaw were disappointed when Khrushchev sharply
denounced modern art; his successors choked off what was left of social-
ist idealism among artists with renewed show trials against writers, and
finally the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. The artistic intelligentsia
retreated into private life, emigrated to Israel or found a new spiritual
home in Russian nationalism.
Nonetheless, an idealistic notion of Soviet internationalism lingered
also through the Era of Stagnation and up until the disintegration of the
USSR. While many political and cultural elites moved towards much
more pragmatic, and often outright cynical, stances on the ideological
foundations of the Soviet state, a separate group carried further their

1
Leonov, Licholet’e, p. 36.
2
Sergej Mikojan, ‘Neuželi tridcat’ piat’ let?’, Latinskaja Amerika 7 (2004), 29.

230

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 Between ‘gorillas’ and guerrillas 231

concept of internationalist solidarity out of conviction: academic special-

ists from Soviet area studies. These scholars, called meždunarodniki (a
term that superseded that of the synonymous internacionalisty), were
specialists in one specific world region – including all parts of the global
South – and they were to supply the Soviet state and CPSU organisations
with reliable information on political, social, economic and cultural
developments of that area. Their intellectual work and world-view are
proof of the on-going relevance of ideology in the late Soviet Union, and
their influence on Soviet politics and culture helps explain a series of
paradoxes in Soviet relations with the Third World in the late 1960s and
throughout the 1970s.
Soviet foreign policy under Brezhnev was, on the one hand, character-
ised by increasing international integration. The Soviet foreign ministry
pushed for the expansion of a conventional diplomatic network, and the
USSR collaborated in ever more international organisations. This ‘nor-
malisation’ of Soviet behaviour in world affairs laid the foundation of
détente with the United States. But the Kremlin, in the course of the
1970s, again expanded its sphere of influence all around the Third World,
as it supported, with considerable financial and military means, commun-
ist regimes from the Horn of Africa and the Arabian peninsula to Vietnam.
This contradiction between integration and ideological imperialism was to
do with the fact that Soviet interactions with the world were always based
on two internally competing channels, diplomatic relations on the one
hand, and the international communist network on the other.
This tension was also reflected in relations with Latin America. As this
book has illuminated so far, Soviet self-representation underplayed the
communist character of the USSR and presented the country as a peace-
loving, modern state that played by the rules of the international political
system. The majority of non-communist visitors from the Americas
commented very benignly on the USSR; tens of thousands of Latin
American students who returned to their home countries mostly spread
a rather positive image of the Soviet Union, too. In the same integrative
line, the Soviet Union expanded its diplomatic network: by 1971, ambas-
sadors had been exchanged with all major countries of the hemisphere
except the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Honduras and Paraguay – and
this meant that the motherland of socialism now maintained relation-
ships with a whole series of anti-communist military dictatorships.
The Thaw-era optimism, which led the Soviets to support nationalist
developmentalist regimes in the Third World, was gone, and so were
charismatic leaders from Nasser in Egypt to Sukarno in Indonesia and
Goulart in Brazil. The USSR now actually acquired a liking for several
military regimes. The Brazilian coup in 1964 was publicly condemned by

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 232 Desk revolutionaries

the Soviet leadership but, in fact, a continuing collaboration with the

ruling generals proved beneficial for both sides.3 Similarly, when the
military took power in Panama (1968), Bolivia and Peru (both 1969),
Soviet media initially denounced them as ‘fascist take-overs’ but, before
long, coverage of the Andean military regimes, and of the Panamanian
caudillo Torrijos, became very favourable. The Soviets developed close
relations with the Peruvian military dictator Velasco: they sold him large
amounts of heavy-duty weaponry, distributed many scholarships for
Peruvian students, sent doctors and medical care after an earthquake in
1970, and applied the usual programme for states considered ‘friends of
the Soviet Union’.4
The ‘gorillas’, as the military dictators came to be called all over the
Americas, offered some advantages to Soviet foreign policy: they were
occasionally critical of the United States and – most importantly –
unlike socialists, never asked for financial help from Moscow. ‘At that
time, revolutions worried the Kremlin more than the reactionaries’,
Nikolaj Leonov recalled, ‘for when a revolution succeeded, requests
for help, credits and money quickly followed. A stable conservative
government, however, . . . offered normal relations, without problems,
without concerns.’5 The Soviet foreign ministry and its boss Gromyko
were now openly contemptuous of further Third World adventures:
‘not even the Central Committee could get him to travel to the Middle
East, Africa or Latin America’, Leonov believed.6 Gromyko did eventu-
ally travel to Cuba with Party boss Brezhnev in 1974; the chairman of
the Council of Ministers, Kosygin, had already been there in 1967 and,
throughout the 1970s, several high-ranking Soviet state representatives
visited many other Latin American countries. Yet these official state
visits had little to do with internationalist solidarity or socialist
romanticism. They were much more signs of an adaptation of Soviet
politicians to international customs of diplomacy. With their foreign
trade, too, the Soviets participated in the world economic system – in
Latin America, remarkably, they traded mostly with the military regimes
in Brazil and Argentina.
This rapprochement to ‘fascist’ dictators put pro-Moscow communist
parties to an even more painful acid test than ‘peaceful coexistence’ with

3
Rupprecht, ‘Socialist High Modernity and Global Stagnation’.
4
Juan Cobo, ‘Die sowjetische Hilfe für Peru’, Neue Zeit 43 (1970), 16–17; Michail
Kruglow, ‘Die peruanische Überraschung’, Neue Zeit 8 (1969), 15; Izvestija, 22
Nov. 1969; Juan Cobo, ‘Der Militärputsch in Peru’, Neue Zeit 41 (1968), 18.
5
Nikolai Leonov, Eugenia Fediakova and Joaquin Fermandois, ‘El general Nikolai Leonov
en el CEP’, Estudios Públicos 73 (1999), 78.
6
Leonov, Licholet’e, p. 141.

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 Between ‘gorillas’ and guerrillas 233

the ‘imperialist’ West. Many political forces in the USSR were now
indeed so unenthusiastic about revolutionary, or even only reform-
oriented, leftists that many ‘friends of the Soviet Union’ complained of
being neglected in letters to Moscow. Members of the Soviet–Uruguayan
Friendship Society asked for more Soviet activity in Montevideo in a
1967 report – other countries such as West Germany and the United
States now constantly offered free or very cheap concerts and art exhib-
itions, they complained.7 The Soviet–Bolivian Friendship Society, too,
wrote several times to Moscow in 1971, disappointed that their letters
remained unanswered and that they were never again invited to the
Soviet Union.8
At a time when Marxist thought was on the rise at universities all over
Latin America, Soviet-style communism lost further ground. Indigenous
Marxism had existed in parallel all along, and Trotskyism was a challenge
still, while ever more socialists abandoned the Soviet Union and turned
to Castroism and Maoism. As early as 1962, the pro-China PCdoB had
seceded from the old Brazilian Communist Party PCB. Similar break-
aways occurred now in Bolivia and Colombia, and several happened even
in Peru: after a trip to China during the Cultural Revolution, the phil-
osophy professor Abimael Guzmán split the Maoist Sendero Luminoso
(Shining Path, or more formally Partido Comunista del Perú – por el
Sendero Luminoso de José Carlos Mariátegui) from the traditional
Peruvian Communist Party. Castroites and Maoists both advocated
violent struggle; the former realised it as guerrilleros against dictators
and their armies, as in Argentina, Bolivia and Brazil. The Maoists in
Peru unleashed a spiral of violence against the entire population, above
all against precisely the indigenous population of rural Peru they claimed
to be fighting for. While Cuba did support some groups (albeit not the
Sendero Luminoso) with weapons and training, Beijing’s activities
remained at a symbolic level. With the economic reforms in late 1970s
China, the Latin American Maoists turned away from this role model,
too, and found their last friend in Enver Hoxha’s Albania.9 But these
guerrilla groups, which formed in many Latin American states and
regions, now operated mostly without support, or even against the expli-
cit will, of traditional Soviet-oriented communist parties. Che Guevara
was forsaken by the Partido Comunista de Bolivia, and executed by the
Bolivian army in 1967.

7
Undated, GARF f.9518 op.1 d.1015 ll.17–19.
8
25 Jan. 1971, GARF f.9576 op.10 d.141 l.7; 5 Jun. 1971, GARF f.9576 op.10 d.141
ll.102–103.
9
Löwy and Pearlman (eds.), Marxism in Latin America from 1909 to the Present, pp. xiii–lviii.

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 234 Desk revolutionaries

However, all this new pragmatism, increased professionalism and

‘normalisation’ of Soviet foreign policy notwithstanding, the Soviets,
throughout the Brezhnev period and thereafter, continued their support
for those communist parties that stayed faithful to Moscow and tolerated
the support of guerrilla units by their ally Cuba. The Communist Party of
Chile alone received US$ 200,000 in 1963 and US$ 645,000 in 1973,
while Soviet foreign policy was very restrained towards the Popular
Front-governed Chile.10 This money was taken in cash to Latin America
from Moscow and distributed via the KGB network, which was inter-
woven with the Soviet embassies. While not inciting revolutions, the
KGB was now, after the end of Khrushchev’s reign, allowed to be much
more active in Third World politics than the Kremlin and especially the
foreign ministry.11
There are several reasons for this contradictory policy. For one thing,
even the most Realist pragmatists in the Kremlin and the foreign ministry
had to acknowledge that the Latin American radical left, a potentially
pro-Soviet group, had not only turned to Cuba, but were also increas-
ingly flirting with Chinese-Maoist ideas. This was considered a problem,
and concessions were made to keep them interested in the Soviet
model.12 Secondly, the two-track foreign policy had its roots in a rivalry
between the foreign ministry and the International Department of the
Central Committee. In this controversy, the civil servants in the ministry
campaigned, firstly, for restrictions in Third World adventures and,
secondly, for more political power for themselves, while members of
the International Department pushed for more ‘revolutionary’ activity
in the Third World.13
All but one member of the International Department (as of 1983) were
scholars from the area studies institutes; all but one were doktory nauk,
the highest academic degree in the Soviet system. These 150 mežduna-
rodniki, on the one side, taught and researched and, on the other side,
influenced the conception of Soviet foreign policy. Many of them had
supported Khrushchev’s internal reforms and his Third World endeav-
ours and were unhappy with the retrenchment under the new Soviet
leadership. From the 1970s, some 7,400 meždunarodniki surrounded

10
These were huge amounts of hard foreign exchange, whose numbers must be multiplied
by more than ten to give today’s value, for the ever badly off Soviet Union; see Arturo
Fontaine Talavera, ‘Estados Unidos y Unión Soviética en Chile’, Estudios Públicos 72
(1998).
11
Andrew and Mitrokhin, The World Was Going Our Way, p. 40; Leonov et al., ‘El general
Nikolai Leonov en el CEP’, 78; Benjamin Welles, ‘Soviet Intelligence Role in Latin
America Rises’, New York Times, 7 Dec. 1970.
12 13
Prizel, Latin America through Soviet Eyes, p. 136. Westad, The Global Cold War.

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 Between ‘gorillas’ and guerrillas 235

the nerve centre of Soviet foreign policy making. Using their connections
to the influential Central Committee, it was they who pushed for more
Soviet activities in the Third World, not only to strengthen the USSR’s
geo-political position, but also out of socialist internationalist
conviction.14
This fifth and final chapter will track the idea of internationalism in the
late Soviet Union. Ideas do not exist in and of themselves; they need
people who carry them, and they need to be communicated from gener-
ation to generation. The personal history of individuals and groups
determines, to a great extent, whether an idea continues to live or dies
out. The chapter thus looks at lifelines and self-conceptions of selected
meždunarodniki in Latin American studies. Mostly born in the 1920s,
they had experienced, as young men, Stalinist state terror and the war
against Germany. They received their higher education during late Sta-
linism and began their professional careers in Soviet academe during the
Thaw. The meždunarodniki shared Khrushchev’s idealism for the pro-
spects of a de-Stalinised socialism and spread this spirit in state and Party
organisations well into the 1980s.
The international experts in the Soviet Union have received little
attention from historians. Most of what is known about them was
gathered and interpreted by US Sovietologists during the Cold War,
who analysed their publications not out of a purely academic interest in
the area studies, but in a sort of political exegesis. Information on Soviet
political internal debates was hard to come by, and the Kremlinologists
thus read academic writing just as they interpreted the symbolic politics
of the inner circle of Soviet leadership: as a reflection or a testing probe
on Soviet foreign policy stances.15 In a variant thereof, western observers
divined secret deviance and criticism of the communist regime between
the lines of Soviet academic writing. Both views had in common that they

14
Richmond, Cultural Exchange and the Cold War, p. 81; Rose E. Gottemoeller and Paul
Fritz Langer, Foreign Area Studies in the USSR: Training and Employment of Specialists
(Santa Monica: Rand, 1983), p. 93.
15
Prizel, Latin America through Soviet Eyes; Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier, The Soviet Union and
the Third World: An Economic Bind (Westport: Praeger, 1983), pp. 40–51; Oded Eran,
Mezhdunarodniki: An Assessment of Professional Expertise in the Making of Soviet Foreign
Policy (Ramat Gan, Israel: Turtledove Publications, 1979); Joseph Gregory Oswald and
Robert G. Carlton (eds.), Soviet Image of Contemporary Latin America: Compiled and
Translated from Russian. A Documentary History 1960–1968 (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1970). Some of these authors, especially during times of high political tension,
displayed a strong political bias and sometimes rather crudely exaggerated Soviet
ambitions to conquer the world by all means possible, e.g. Tyrus W. Cobb, ‘National
Security Perspectives of Soviet "Think Tanks"’, Problems of Communism 30/6 (1981), 52;
P. Urban, ‘Los estudios iberoamericanos en la URSS’, Estudios sobre la Unión Soviética 3
(1962), 27–40.

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 236 Desk revolutionaries

saw Soviet academia only as a reflection of political phenomena, of Soviet

foreign and domestic policy. The interest was not so much in the aca-
demics themselves, but in their writing, in order ‘to find information that
could help answer [questions about the Soviet Union] and, in the pro-
cess, to enhance our ability to predict world affairs’.16
Soviet academics in area studies were indeed linked closely to Soviet
foreign policy, and, occasionally, scholars found cryptic ways to cau-
tiously criticise conditions in the country or actions of their government.
However, while there cannot be talk of a free scientific community in the
Soviet Union, science not only reflected high politics. It also had a story
of its own. The meždunarodniki were often the fulcrum of internationalist
activities, not merely subordinated numb executers of Politburo orders.
They themselves drafted and implemented programmes of Soviet inter-
nationalism after Stalin until the end of the Cold War. An institutional
history and a collective biography will prove that the meždunarodniki,
drawing their socialist convictions from those internationalists who sur-
vived the Stalinist purges, were actually the last true believers in Soviet
internationalism after Stalin. Their debates about Salvador Allende’s
raise and fall as Chilean president will make clear that the meždunarodniki
developed a rather diversified knowledge on the world abroad from the
early 1970s – and did not always comply with official Soviet foreign
policy stances. They carried their ethos of internationalism, their sense
of a mission to help the global South develop along its own lines, into
Soviet politics. The meždunarodniki’s calls for solidarity with Sandinista
Nicaragua around 1980, finally, will illustrate that it was usually they who
rallied – if often in vain – for more Soviet support of worldwide leftist
movements.

Niches and nooks of internationalism during late

Stalinism
Scholars in the social sciences and humanities were always considered
important for the legitimisation of the Soviet regime, and the last gener-
ation with pre-revolutionary socialisation had therefore been severely hit
by Stalinist terror campaigns. The same fate befell many socialist inter-
nationalists, scholars or not, and especially those who had fought in the
Spanish Civil War. They suffered extensively in two waves of purges, one

16
It was surmised, for example, that Soviet studies on China in the late 1970s actually
debated the future of the USSR itself; see Gilbert Rozman, A Mirror for Socialism: Soviet
Criticisms of China (London: Tauris, 1985), p. 3. Studies that do look at individual
scholars have not included the international experts; see Beyrau, Intelligenz und Dissens.

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 Niches and nooks of internationalism during late Stalinism 237

in the Soviet Union in the late 1930s and another in the whole of Soviet-
controlled eastern Europe in the late 1940s. A look at the lives of some of
those who survived this persecution helps us understand the intellectual
roots of Soviet internationalism after Stalin. To that end, it is worthwhile
surveying an institution where many of the future meždunarodniki were
trained by those old internationalists: the Moskovskij Gosudarstvennyj
Institut Meždunarodnych Otnošenij (Moscow Institute for International
Relations, MGIMO).
Founded as a branch of Moscow State University in 1943, MGIMO
was attached as the diplomatic school to the foreign ministry the year
after. Unlike in traditional university curricula, students were educated
in history, political science, economy and law at the same time, and they
had to choose a geographical, linguistic and thematic major according
to their career plans.17 MGIMO was considered a highly elite cadre
school, which trained the bulk of Soviet diplomats, area studies experts,
international correspondents and decision makers in foreign policy.
Before the war, no Soviet institution – besides the short-lived Ispano-
Amerikanskoe Obščestvo in Leningrad – had dealt exclusively with Latin
American affairs, which were left to ‘solitary enthusiasts’.18 Those who
now taught the new generation at MGIMO in Latin American affairs had
developed their own expertise on the Hispanic world from their careers
as professional internationalists and academics during the 1920s
and 1930s.
Three of these ‘father figures’ of Soviet Latin Americanists, Ivan
Majskij, Lev Zubok and Iosif Grigulevič, each represent a different
trajectory of this ‘old’ socialist internationalism.19 Ivan Majskij
(1884–1975) was an early Menshevik who spent the greater part of his
younger life alternating between tsarist prisons and western Europe. In
Soviet Russia, he had become a member of the CPSU in 1921, chief
editor of the journal Zvezda (The Star) and began a diplomatic career
that led him, as ambassador, to Finland, Japan and Great Britain during
the war. Majskij was the Soviet representative on the Transnational
Committee for Non-Interference into the Spanish Civil War (in which

17
Anatolij Torkunov (ed.), MGIMO Universitet: tradicii i sovremennost’ (1944–2009)
(Moscow: Moskovskie Učebniki, 2009).
18
Académia de las Ciencias de la URSS (ed.), Estudios Latinoamericanos soviéticos de hoy
(Moscow: Nauka, 1987), pp. 5–6.
19
The sources of the biographical data, unless otherwise stated, are obituaries and
congratulatory addresses from the last pages of the journal Latinskaja Amerika.
Vladislav Zubok shared information on his grandfather, and some additional
information is taken from the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia and MGIMO’s alumni
website (www.alumni.mgimo.ru; last accessed 15 Mar. 2011).

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 238 Desk revolutionaries

the Soviets actually did interfere) and, as Soviet deputy foreign minister
from 1943, participated in the Yalta and Potsdam conferences. After the
war, he began his academic career as a historian at the Soviet Academy of
Sciences and at MGIMO, where he researched and wrote about the
history of nineteenth-century and republican Spain.
The life history of Lev Zubok (1894–1967) resembled Majskij’s in
many respects: born into a working-class Jewish family from Odessa,
Zubok emigrated to the United States before the First World War. As a
historian at the University of Pennsylvania, he became active in the US
labour movement and subsequently a member of the CPUSA. He
returned to Russia after the Civil War, enrolled in the CPSU, worked
with the old Bolshevik internationalist Solomon Lozovskij in the Profin-
tern and began a successful career as a historian with a focus on US
imperialism in Latin America and the worldwide workers’ movement.
Just like Majskij, Zubok taught classes at MGIMO from the late 1940s,
where Lozovskij, by now deputy foreign minister and head of the Sovin-
formbjuro, was widely read, and even came to give talks at least once a
month, as one student remembered.20
It was from this old guard of internationalist professors that students at
MGIMO absorbed their anti-Stalinist socialist ideals and internationalist
spirit, as well as from a childhood memory: members of an informal
‘Spanish’ circle at MGIMO recalled their romanticism for the Spanish
Civil War as the main motive for focusing their studies on the Hispanic
world. ‘All the boys in class were enthusiastic’, a student of international
journalism remembered; ‘we dreamt of the Ebro and of Madrid. At night
in school, we saw the Kinokronika and our rector would give us the latest
news from Spain . . . It was for sentimental-romantic reasons that I picked
Spanish as my foreign language, which I associated with internationalist
solidarity.’21 Another ‘Spaniard’ confirmed: it was ‘out of sympathy for
the internationalist fighters of the Spanish Civil War’ that he chose the
Spanish-speaking world as his regional field.22 Before long, the ‘Spanish
group’ focused much more on Latin America than Spain, which added
another attraction to some prospective students: he chose this field,
another student later explained, because of the ‘exoticism of these far-
away countries . . . the prospect of travelling there was just too
tempting’.23

20
Torkunov (ed.), MGIMO Universitet, p. 15.
21
Karen Chačaturov, Zapiski očevidca (Moscow: Novosti, 1996), pp. 67–9.
22
Leonov, Licholet’e, p. 20.
23
B. Martynov, ‘Molodoj čelovek’, Latinskaja Amerika 7 (2006), 140.

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 Niches and nooks of internationalism during late Stalinism 239

Before the future meždunarodniki made it to Latin America personally,

the lack of recent first-hand information on their subject of study and
political interference were serious limitations on the academic training at
MGIMO until the end of Stalinism. Academic writings in Russian on the
Third World were still very rare at the time. ‘You cannot imagine how
difficult it was to get any information,’ one of them recalled; ‘books were
such a rarity in the libraries!’24 Another alumnus from the ‘Spanish
group’ remembered how he, after getting his degree from MGIMO,
was sent abroad in the mid 1950s, but ‘had no clue of many things
[about Latin America] that today every first-former knows’.25 By Soviet
standards, however, the young future Latin Americanists got a good
general education thanks to the individual abilities of several academic
teachers.
One of the few ‘solitary enthusiasts’ who had written about Latin
America in the 1930s was the geographer and historian Ivan Vitver
(1891–1966), who joined MGIMO in the late 1940s. The Indonesia
expert Aleksandr Guber, too, had done some, if not much, research on
Latin America at Moscow State University before the war, enough for
someone from the younger generation to declare him the ‘patriarch of
Soviet Latin Americanists’. Several other outstanding academics from
different fields kept alive a tradition of serious scholarship at MGIMO.
Evgenij Tarle had already been a respected historian before the October
Revolution and had secured Stalin’s clemency with an ostentatious
account of Napoleon’s Russia campaign. As one of the founders of
MGIMO, he taught there from the beginning and was later considered
to be the ‘teacher of the šestidesjatniki’, the romantic socialist generation
of the 1960s. The orientalist Grigorij Erenburg (cousin of the writer Ilya
Ehrenburg), the historian of the ancient world Anatolij Bokščanin, the
Arabist Charlampij Baranov and the philosophers Michail Lifšic and
Mark Rozental were remembered by their students as other remarkable
and influential intellectuals, as was the jurist Sergej Krylov, one of the
authors of the UN Charter and a judge at the International Court of
Justice.26
‘In the very early days of the institute, only academic performance and
not bribery or nepotism decided admission’, recalled an alumnus.27
‘Initially, there was a very democratic spirit’, a student from the first

24
Viktor Vol’skij, ‘Sovetskaja latinoamerikanistika: nekotorye itogi i zadači’, Latinskaja
Amerika 3 (1971), 6–16.
25
Chačaturov, Zapiski očevidca, pp. 10–25.
26
Kutejščikova, Moskva-Meksiko-Moskva, p. 153; Viktor Vol’skij, ‘I. A. Vítver – odin iz
osnovatelej sovetskoj latinoamerikanistiki’, Latinskaja Amerika 5 (1971), 160–72.
27
Leonov, Licholet’e, pp. 8–22.

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 240 Desk revolutionaries

generation remembered in the same vein; ‘it was only a bit later that all
the sons and daughters of rank-and-file Party members, statesmen and
diplomats came . . . Classes at MGIMO were broad and intensive; there
were regional studies, politics, economy, but also literature on the
schedule . . . Most teachers were outstanding in their field.’ His
Spanish-language teacher was a refugee from the Civil War; modern
history was taught by Al’bert Manfred, a specialist on Russian–French
relations, who had done time in the Gulag for three years in the 1930s.28
Another student recalled the seminars as a ‘laboratory of interdiscip-
linary research’ and the education at MGIMO ‘the best thing that could
have happened to me . . . a fantastic humanistic education that opened up
an interesting and fulfilling life for me’.29 Less impressive were the
obligatory ‘grey lecturers of Marxism-Leninism’ and classes by retired
diplomats who also taught at MGIMO. And lingering as downright
appalling and very burdensome in the Latin Americanists’ memoirs
was the ‘moral terror’ instigated by some Komsomol activists against
Jewish professors and students on campus in any way ‘deviant’ or
‘suspicious’.
‘There were three sorts of students’, one of them explained: firstly, the
offspring of the Party and state elite; secondly, young and talented but
inexperienced boys from provincial Russia, often with parents from the
lower intelligentsia; and thirdly the veterans from the Second World
War. The latter received preferential treatment and were admired by
the younger ones, but had often difficulties in keeping up with academic
standards in class. Many of the second group became good journalists
and diplomats, the alumni recalled, but they were consumed by career-
ism from early on. And then there were those who had the same ambi-
tion, but no talent. They tried to make up for their academic deficits with
special commitments to ‘social work’: ‘this was not only bothersome, but
outright dangerous. Unfortunately these people, albeit a minority, dom-
inated the atmosphere at MGIMO at that time.’ He summed up: ‘it was
an oppressive atmosphere . . . not a church of the sciences, but a career
springboard’.30
The renewed state terror of late Stalinism had made itself palpable also
within academe. Serious research and publications had almost come to a
standstill and were replaced by ‘axioms . . . that, at most, were allowed to
be illustrated, yet not to be discussed’ and couched in an ‘ideological

28
Chačaturov, Zapiski očevidca, pp. 67–9.
29
A. Šestopal and N. Anikeeva, ‘Iberoamerikanistika v MGIMO: tradicii i sovremennost’’,
Latinskaja Amerika 4 (2001), 24–9.
30
Leonov, Licholet’e, pp. 8–22.

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 Niches and nooks of internationalism during late Stalinism 241

bellicose language’.31 For Jewish students, it was very difficult to get

admitted to MGIMO before the death of Stalin. In private conversations
between professors and students, some criticism seems to have been
voiced on these restrictions: a student recalled that one professor cursed
Stalin as a staryj čert (old devil) in front of him, courage that – at least in
retrospect – impressed him deeply.32 When the last wave of the anti-
cosmopolitan campaign hit the Soviet Union, it spilled into MGIMO,
too: Majskij was arrested, and Lozovskij even sentenced to death and
executed in 1952, while Zubok merely lost his job as a professor at
Moscow State University and his position at the Vysšaja Partijanja Škola
(Higher Party School), the Central Committee’s research institute.
A third important ‘father figure’ of Soviet Latin Americanists spent
these leaden years of late Stalinism mostly abroad in official missions.
The turbulent life of Iosif Grigulevič (1913–88) justifies some extra lines
here: born to a Karaite Jewish family in Lithuania, Grigulevič, after being
imprisoned and deported from tsarist Russia for being a member of the
illegal Polish Communist Party, studied at the Sorbonne in Paris. He
spent much time in Argentina, where he worked for French communist
front organisations and the Comintern. In 1936, he travelled to Spain,
where he made friends with the Izvestija and Pravda correspondents Ilya
Ehrenburg and Michail Kol’cov, with TASS envoy Ovadi Savič, with the
Latin American left radical intelligentsia, and with a young Catalan
communist by the name of Ramón Mercader. Under the command of
the NKVD general Aleksandr Orlov, Grigulevič (under his noms de guerre
‘Max’ and ‘Filipe’) organised the arrest and execution of several left
deviants in Spain. Most infamously, Andreu Nin, head of the anti-
Stalinist Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (Workers’ Party of
Marxist Unification, POUM), was kidnapped from a Falange prison in
1937, put on trial by Grigulevič and shot by a ‘mobile group’ two
days later.
Summoned to Moscow himself in 1939, Grigulevič feared the worst,
but was in fact only given training as a secret agent. Unlike his brother-in-
arms, Pravda correspondent and NKVD informer Kol’cov, he survived
the purges, partly because he was important to Stalin for another task: in
1940, he travelled (now as ‘Južek’) to Mexico City, where he joined a
group around Pablo Neruda and David Siqueiros in a first and unsuc-
cessful attempt to assassinate Leon Trotsky.33 For a second assault,

31
Beyrau, Intelligenz und Dissens, p. 47.
32
Chačaturov, Zapiski očevidca, p. 70; Leonov, Licholet’e, pp. 18–20.
33
Neruda always disavowed his participation, but probably did help at least with visa issues
as Chilean consul to Mexico at the time, and was also good friends with everyone else in

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 242 Desk revolutionaries

Grigulevič only did the organising and left the execution to his young
friend from Spain, Ramón Mercader, who killed Trotsky in August that
year. Grigulevič (now as ‘Artur’) remained in Latin America for several
years as an undercover NKVD agent, supplied Moscow with information
on the continent, wove a net of acquaintances and planted bombs where
German representatives tried to propagate Nazism among European
immigrants.
In 1949, Grigulevič moved to Rome (as ‘Teodoro B. Castro’), estab-
lished an import/export business with Central America and succeeded in
the biggest exploit of his career as a spy: with the help of the writer and
diplomat Joaquín Gutiérrez (see Chapter 3), he managed to become the
Costa Rican ambassador to the Vatican and, in 1952, to Italy and to
Yugoslavia as well. The Soviets needed information on the politics of the
Holy See, as they now occupied Catholic territories in eastern Europe;
and they needed information on international opinion on the Italian–
Yugoslav dispute over the future of Trieste. Grigulevič, now awarded
Soviet citizenship and a CPSU membership card, developed a friendship
with the pope and with the Italian prime minister Alcide de Gasperi; he
represented Costa Rica at the 6th General Assembly of the United
Nations, was a well-known and popular man in Rome’s intellectual and
diplomatic scene, and had a close friendship with the female US ambas-
sador to Italy.
Grigulevič’s task was not only to keep Moscow informed. After years of
planning, he was finally able to arrange meetings with high officials in
Yugoslavia, as he was the one chosen to assassinate Tito. The execution
was planned for April 1953, but was aborted, on the orders of Lavrentij
Berija, after Stalin died in March. In the same year, Grigulevič’s superior
in the Spanish Civil War, Aleksandr Orlov, defected to the United States
(which actually went unnoticed by the US authorities for many years),
and the identity of Mercader, who served twenty years in a Mexican
prison without ever giving his name, was revealed by his mother. The
cover of Castro, the Costa Rican diplomat, was in danger, and funda-
mental political changes were taking place in Moscow – Grigulevič was
ordered back to the USSR in December 1953.34
Grigulevič was the archetype of the revolutionary internationalist mili-
tant: born to a national minority of the Russian empire, highly educated,

the group, including the hitman Vittorio Vidali. Siqueiros vigorously defended his own –
very physical – participation in the first attack, but later claimed ‘this was only to scare
[Trotsky], not to kill him’. See Siqueiros, Me llamaban el Coronelazo, p. 369.
34
For a more detailed account of Grigulevič’s life, see Marjorie Ross, El secreto encanto de la
KGB: las cinco vidas de Iósif Griguliévich (San José, Costa Rica: Grupo Editorial Norma,
2004).

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 New institutions and a new generation 243

smart, cultured and worldly. He was fluent not only in Yiddish, Lithu-
anian, Russian and Spanish (the latter to the extent that he convinced
Costa Ricans he was their compatriot), but also spoke Polish, English,
French, Italian and Portuguese. He was an expert in Latin American
literature and European ancient history, about which he gave lectures at
the Italian Academy of Sciences during his time in Rome. At the same
time, he was a hyper-ideologised communist cadre, ruthless when it
came to eliminating real or perceived adversaries in mokrye dela (wet
business), subordinate to any and every order of the Stalinised Com-
munist International.
Iosif Grigulevič, the internationalist militant, had his intellectual roots
in the communist world movement, as had the other ‘father figures’ of
Soviet Latin Americanists. Each in their own way, they were convinced
and active socialist internationalists: Majskij was an internationalist pol-
itician, Zubok an internationalist academic. All of them influenced a
younger generation of meždunarodniki, through their positions as aca-
demic teachers from the late 1940s. It was people like Zubok, Majskij and
Grigulevič who again raised the banner of internationalism in the Soviet
Union as soon as this became possible when the isolation and national-
ism of late Stalinism ended.

New Thaw-era institutions and a new generation of

professional internationalists
When the Third World appeared on the Soviet horizon from the mid
1950s, knowledge of the global South was still very limited. At the time of
Stalin’s death, there was no Soviet correspondent in the entire Third
World, and hardly any recent information on these vast areas of the world
was available in libraries. The romanticising Soviet imagery and political
conception of Latin America in the 1950s and early 1960s, as described
in Chapter 2, was still based on this kind of schematic perception of the
world abroad. In order to interact with the global South more success-
fully in its own interest, the Soviets urgently needed more expertise on
global affairs in the Party and state organs. To that end, they established
an ever-expanding network of ‘area studies’ from the late 1950s. These
new research centres, organised around universities and branches of the
Soviet Academy of Sciences, trained and employed an increasing
number of specialists on all world regions.
The institutional framework to develop foreign expertise after
1953 was based on two trajectories: firstly, as far back as the nineteenth
century, Russian vostokovedenie (orientalism) had dealt academically with
the geography, languages, history and cultures of Asia, both within and

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 244 Desk revolutionaries

outside the empire. As alluded to earlier in this book, the Soviets’ view of
the emerging Third World from the mid 1950s was shaped by the experi-
ence they had had with the inner periphery in Central Asia and the
Caucasus. In 1954, MGIMO incorporated the Moskovskij Institut Vos-
tokovedenija (Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies). The second trajec-
tory was an external inspiration, to which Anastas Mikojan referred
during his speech at the 20th Party Congress in 1956: ‘in the United
States, there are more than fifteen scientific institutes that study the
Soviet economy alone . . . and we snore and close down old research
centres!’35 The establishment of think tanks of the Rand Corporation
type in the United States had not gone unnoticed in Moscow; thus the
Soviets started to establish their own. The most notable foundation
concerned with the intellectual conquest of the world abroad was actually
a re-establishment: the Institut Mirovogo Chozjajstva i Mirovoj Politiki
(Institute of World Economy and Politics) had been shut down in
1947 because its Hungarian director Jenö Varga was a foreigner and,
just as unfashionable at that time, had predicted the economic conver-
gence of capitalism and socialism. In 1956, shortly after Mikojan’s
speech, the institute reopened with the more modern sounding name
Institut Mirovogo Ekonomiki i Meždunarodnych Otnošenij (Institute of
World Economy and International Relations, IMEMO). As a branch of
the Soviet Academy of Sciences, it was led initially by the Armenian
Anušavan Arzumanjan and, from 1959, Nikolaj Inozemcev headed an
agency that eventually employed 700 high-profile researchers in its own
tower building in Moscow’s Novye Čeremuški district. At IMEMO, they
conducted research in all branches of the social sciences and provided
Soviet organs with information on global economic, political and social
developments. Like all foreign institutes in the USSR, it had to contrib-
ute to foreign propaganda and public relations.36
Besides IMEMO, the Soviet Academy of Sciences established several
regional study centres that eventually covered the whole world. The
Institut Narodov Azii (Institute of the Peoples of Asia, INA) developed
several subdivisions from Japan to Pacific studies and the Middle East).
An independent Institut Afriki (Africa Institute, IAF) came into being in
1959; one for the USA and Canada followed some years later. The
Institut Latinskoj Ameriki (Institute of Latin America, ILA) opened its

35
Quoted in Gerhard Duda, Jenö Varga und die Geschichte des Instituts für Weltwirtschaft und
Weltpolitik in Moskau 1921–1970: Zu den Möglichkeiten und Grenzen wissenschaftlicher
Auslandsanalyse in der Sowjetunion (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1994), p. 284.
36
Duda, Jenö Varga und die Geschichte des Instituts für Weltwirtschaft und Weltpolitik in
Moskau 1921–1970; Rose, The Soviet Propaganda Network, p. 269.

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 New institutions and a new generation 245

doors, in the spring of 1961, in a vast former military building in central

Bol’šaja Ordynka street in Moscow. More than a hundred researchers
and an expanding special library with international literature and journals
(much of it western) made it one of the largest research facilities of its
kind on Latin America worldwide. Seven departments gathered and
processed information on the economy, foreign policy, workers and
social movements, culture, geography, history and agrarian problems of
all states and cultures south of the Rio Grande. The recently ‘discovered’
and cherished revolutionary Cuba got its own department.37
Within already existing structures of the Academy and many more
scientific and political institutions, too, regional offices now gathered
worldwide regional expertise. The Moscow State Institute of History
opened a Latin American section in 1953. Several departments of the
Soviet Academy of Sciences followed: in 1957, IMEMO split its depart-
ment of the Americas into a northern branch for the United States and
Canada, and a Latin American one; the Gorky Institute of World Litera-
ture, the Institute of General History and the Institute of Philosophy had
completed the same restructuring by 1961.38 Smaller Latin America
centres opened at universities all over the Union: in Leningrad and Kiev,
and also in Voronezh, Alma-Ata, Frunze, Dushanbe, Lvov, Tbilisi, Baku
and Kishinev. But most resources for this expanded research on the
Third World were allocated to Moscow, where the old internationalists
filled the many newly created research and teaching positions.
Ivan Majskij, released from the Gulag in 1955, now supervised a young
generation of historians of the modern Hispanic world at Moscow
State University. Lev Zubok, rehabilitated after Stalin’s death, kept
teaching at MGIMO until 1961. In parallel, he was a senior researcher
at the Institute of History in the Soviet Academy of Sciences, where he
finished his magnum opus, a grand two-volume history of the Second
International.39 Iosif Grigulevič was dismissed from the secret service in
1956 and given positions at the Institute of Ethnography at the Soviet
Academy of Sciences, and was a founding member of the ILA, where he
worked for the remaining twenty-seven years of his life. In addition, he
was an advisor to the Latin American department of VOKS and the
GKKS, and he was appointed vice-president of the friendship society
with Venezuela. He was awarded a doktor nauk for his study of the Cuban

37
Viktor Vol’skii, ‘The Study of Latin America in the USSR’, Latin American Research
Review 3/1 (1967), 85.
38
E. Larin, ‘Centr latinoamerikanskich issledovanij Instituta vseobščej istorii’, Latinskaja
Amerika 4 (2001), 46–8.
39
Lev Zubok, Istorija vtorogo internacionala (Moscow: Nauka, 1966).

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 246 Desk revolutionaries

cultural revolution and became an editor of a number of journals and a

member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. His hopes for socialism were
still alive in an interview he gave on his 70th birthday: ‘the French
Revolution needed a hundred years, too, to be established in Europe.
Latin America will not need that much time to reach socialism.’40 Gri-
gulevič knew probably every single rank-and-file person in the Spanish
and Latin American left and communist movements, and he was well
connected to the highest positions within the Soviet Union. Through his
classes on Latin American history (and, while his past remained secret,
on spying techniques to KGB cadets), and through an impressive output
of academic writings, Grigulevič conveyed both his knowledge and his
internationalist ideals to a younger generation.41

Knowledge exchange, knowledge expansion

Thanks to the quick build-up of area studies, and contacts re-established
with international academe, the Soviet gap in knowledge of the outside
world gradually filled. In 1946, Soviet scholars had published one book
on Latin America; in 1953 the number had risen slightly to twelve. Seven
years later, even before contacts with Cuba were established, sixty
volumes a year informed Soviet readers about all aspects of life in and
history of Latin America.42 In 1955, the first cautious scientific contacts
had been established with Latin America, building on a book-exchange
agreement with Mexico. A year later, Soviet researchers had been
allowed, for the first time, to travel to Brazil for a geographical congress.
In 1958, the first scholars from Argentina arrived at the Academy in
Moscow.43 From these tender beginnings, the number of exchanges,
personal as much as intellectual, soon rose significantly. After years of
Stalinist introspection, Soviet academics read and analysed 6,900 inter-
national scientific journals, a Chilean visitor reported in 1959.44

40
Anon., ‘Odin iz starejšich sovetskich Latinoamerikanistov: beseda s členom-
korrespondentom AN SSSR I. R. Grigulevičem’, Latinskaja Amerika 5 (1983), 141–3.
41
Grigulevič, who now occasionally used the new pseudonym Iosif Lavreckij, published
fifty-eight books on the history of the Catholic Church and several best-selling
biographies of Latin American liberation heroes from Bolívar to Che Guevara.
42
Moisej Al’perovič, Sovetskaja istoriografija stran Latinskoj Ameriki (Moscow: Nauka,
1968), p. 17; Institut Latinskoj Ameriki (ed.), Latinskaja Amerika v Sovetskoj pečati
(Moscow: ILA RAN, 1964).
43
S. Korneev, ‘Svjazy Akademii nauk SSSR s Latinskoj Amerikoj’, Latinskaja Amerika 8
(1974), 137–40.
44
Aldunate, En Moscú, p. 68.

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 New institutions and a new generation 247

Somewhat ironically, reading early Cold War US assessments of Latin

America led many Soviet Latin Americanists initially to the same – if
perhaps more cheerful – belief in imminent revolutions all across the
Americas.45
From its foundation in 1961, the ILA, too, sent its researchers abroad,
starting with a series of komandirovki to Cuba. By 1966, it was exchan-
ging books and maintaining personal contacts with scientific centres in
twenty-five countries, most closely with those in eastern Europe and with
the Cuban Academy of Sciences.46 Universities all over the Americas,
western Europe and China and the states of Argentina, Mexico, Brazil
and Cuba signed reciprocal agreements, too. As an institutional member
of several UN bodies, the ILA sent researchers to UNESCO, to the
United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the
Caribbean (CEPALC ) and the United Nations Industrial Development
Organisation (UNIDO). The economist Lev Kločkovskij (1927–),
founding researcher of the ILA and professor at MGIMO, was the Soviet
representative in CEPALC; Anatolij Glinkin (1926–2006), a 1952
MGIMO graduate, led the UNESCO department of social sciences in
Paris from 1968 to 1972.47 The deputy director of the ILA, Marklen
Lazarev (1920–2008), had been a lawyer for the lend-lease programme
and, for that purpose, had lived in the United States from 1944 to 1946,
and was a permanent member of the International Court of Justice in
The Hague for fifteen years.48
By the same token, international academics and representatives of
international organisations were received within the institute’s walls: as
head of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development
(UNCTAD), Raúl Prebisch went to the ILA in 1963, 1966 and 1967,
where his theories of structuralist economics (a precursor of dependency
theory) evoked heated discussion among Soviet researchers. The ILA
regularly organised congresses at which Soviet academics debated with
staff of Latin American embassies, with Latin American students from
Moscow universities and with Latin American leftist writers and polit-
icians, but also with apolitical researchers from all over the world. Roland

45
Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World, p. 197; Al’perovič, Sovetskaja istoriografija
stran Latinskoj Ameriki.
46
Hugo Fazio Vengoa, ‘América Latina Vista por los Académicos Soviéticos: preámbulo
de las relaciónes Ruso-Latinoamericanas’, H-Critica 15 (2003), 35; A. Maevskij,
‘Meždunarodnye naučnye svjazi Instituta Latinskoj Ameriki’, Latinskaja Amerika 7
(1974), 148–52; Vol’skii, ‘The Study of Latin America in the USSR’, 84–6.
47
Anatolij Nikolaevič Glinkin, obituary in Latinskaja Amerika 9 (2006), 105–6; Cole
Blasier, ‘The Soviet Latin Americanists’, Latin American Research Review 16 (1981),
109–10.
48
Marklen Ivanovič Lazarev, obituary in Latinskaja Amerika 2 (2009), 108–9.

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 248 Desk revolutionaries

Ely, an Argentine professor at the Universidad Nacional de Buenos

Aires, conducted research at the ILA in 1965 as a guest scholar. In
1966, eighteen Soviet researchers spent several weeks each in different
Latin American countries, and as many as seventy-five Latin Americans
went as guests of the ILA to Moscow. The US Latin Americanist Russell
Bartley was the first western historian to conduct fieldwork in Moscow in
1967/8. And, when Radio Free Europe organised a conference on Soviet
Latin Americanists in Munich in 1968, the head of the ILA, Viktor
Vol’skij, himself participated. In the late 1960s, the ILA had contacts
with 450 institutes, libraries and universities all over the world. By 1973,
an impressive number of 350 guest scholars had been received, most of
them Latin Americans.49
From 1969, the ILA distributed its own popular scientific journal
internationally: Latinskaja Amerika combined news, articles, essays and
debates on Latin America in a colourful and innovative format. Sergo
Mikojan was editor in chief, and Juan Cobo (a child refugee during the
Spanish Civil War who became a Soviet citizen and prominent journalist
in the Soviet Union) oversaw its Spanish-language edition América
Latina. A decade later, the Russian and Spanish edition were both
appearing monthly at 140 pages in print runs of 15,000 and 8,000 copies
respectively in 54 countries worldwide, an quantity that reflected the
editors’ ambition to be more than a purely academic journal. Leftist
Latin American authors wrote occasionally for the journal, and many
issues were dedicated to a guest of the institute with a long interview.
Many a Latin American left intellectual and politician, from Jorge
Amado and Mario Vargas Llosa to Mexico’s president José Lopez and
Nicaragua’s minister of culture, the leftist Catholic Ernesto Cardenal,
accepted invitations; Gabriel García Márquez went four times for inter-
views and chats with the Soviet Latin Americanists.50

Privileges and limits of academic work in the late Soviet Union

The meždunarodniki’s lives were glamorous by Soviet standards. They
could travel abroad and had access to international literature and con-
tacts with foreigners. While they were not ‘free of competition and

49
Otčet o rabote po linii meždunarodnych naučnych svjazej Instituta Latinskoj Ameriki
AN SSSR v 1966 godu, undated, GARF f.9518 op.1 d.1021 ll.2–25; Blasier, The Giant’s
Rival, p. 180; Bekopitov, ‘Raul’ Prebiš’; Maevskij, ‘Meždunarodnye naučnye svjazi
Instituta Latinskoj Ameriki’, 152; Vol’skii, ‘Sovetskaja latinoamerikanistika’, 13;
Roland T. Ely, ‘El panorama interamericano visto por investigadores de la URSS’,
Journal of Inter-American Studies 8/2 (1966), 294–317.
50
Mikojan, ‘Neuželi tridcat’ piat’ let?’, 36.

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 New institutions and a new generation 249

responsibility for good work’ as a critical western observer believed,

they – as long as they did not dissent too obviously from the official Party
line – lived secure lives protected from unemployment and with many
publishing opportunities.51 In Soviet society, their prestige was high and
so were their salaries: the Portuguese communist Francisco Ferreira,
who worked for the Brazilian radio programme in Moscow, recalled that
his meždunarodnik colleagues at the station not only had an enjoyable job,
a good reputation and privileges such as dachas and many holidays; they
also earned ten times more than the best engineers in the Kharkov
factory, where he had worked previously.52 The Chilean liberal parlia-
mentarian Raúl Aldunate, during his visit to the USSR in 1959, remem-
bered the same ratio between intelligentsia and workers’ wages.53
It is therefore unsurprising that the offspring of many high-ranking
state and Party officials, banned from Party careers according to an
unwritten Soviet rule, were among this group. In the early days, the
daughters of Vjačeslav Molotov and Aleksej Kosygin as well as Georgij
Žukov’s son studied at MGIMO.54 Jurij Brežnev was Soviet trade repre-
sentative in Switzerland, his sister Galina an official for Novosti. Andrej
Gromyko’s son Anatolij firstly went as special envoy to Great Britain and
was later head of the Africa Institute. Ljudmila Kosygina became a
researcher at the Institute of Scientific Information and director of the
All-Union Library for Foreign Literature.55 Not without justification,
western scholars considered the institutniki and especially the meždunar-
odniki a ‘privileged caste’.56
The newly founded area studies were run mostly by loyal social scien-
tists, but, because of their novelty and the relatively liberal intellectual
atmosphere of the Thaw, they benefited from a degree of academic
freedom. In their professional and personal lives, the meždunarodniki
enjoyed privileges that went way beyond what an average Soviet citizen
could expect. That said, they were not given free rein, and they had no
carte blanche for their writings or public speech. The highest authority
on academic questions remained the Central Committee. Only govern-
ment and CPSU institutions and the Academy of Sciences were allowed
to publish political analysis. In social studies and political journals,

51
Apollon Davidson and Irina Filatova, ‘African History: A View from behind the Kremlin
Wall’, in Maxim Matusevich (ed.), Africa in Russia, Russia in Africa: Three Centuries of
Encounters (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2007), p. 118.
52 53
Ferreira, 26 años na União Soviética, pp. 105–6. Aldunate, En Moscú, p. 67.
54
Chačaturov, Zapiski očevidca, pp. 67–9.
55
Leonov, Licholet’e, p. 258; Gottemoeller and Langer, Foreign Area Studies in the USSR,
p. 23.
56
Eran, Mezhdunarodniki, p. 183.

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 250 Desk revolutionaries

editors had to be members of the CPSU, their editors appointed by

higher authorities, and those in significant positions had to be confirmed
by the Central Committee or the Politburo.
Editorial boards for journals covering the outside world always
included high officials from the International Department of the Central
Committee, and every book published within the organisation of the
Academy had to be reviewed by the Academy Council. Finally, all books
and all journal issues had to be counter-checked by the state censor
Glavlit, which did not care much about ideological debates, but usually
only made sure no unwanted information on the Soviet military or
economy was revealed. Criticism of political leaders or the Party was
explicitly forbidden.57 Neither was the choice of research topics com-
pletely free: maxims for Soviet area studies were partijnost’ (partisanship),
konkretnost’ (relevance) and sovremennost’ (topicality).58 When the Cen-
tral Committee wanted a topic researched or political line followed in
academia, they placed – authorless – prefaces in academic journals.59
The closer a research topic was to current affairs, the stricter were the
rules. A meždunarodnik writing on recent developments in a certain area
of the contemporary world was under much closer surveillance than, say,
historians of the eighteenth century or ethnographers, who were rather
free in their expression.60
As for their travels abroad, most meždunarodniki still had to pass
through a complicated screening process before they could leave the
country. Exit visas were given only upon recommendation of the work
place, the local Party branch and, ultimately, the KGB. The latter, in
need of linguistic and regional expertise, actually became an important
employer of meždunarodniki itself, just like the diplomatic service, which
had an entire department that was responsible purely for the surveillance
of its own employees abroad.61

A prosopography of the first generation of ‘Mgimovci’

The massive expansion and differentiation of institutionalised expertise
on Latin America in the USSR provided hundreds of lucrative and

57
Jerry F. Hough, The Struggle for the Third World: Soviet Debates and American Options
(Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1986).
58
Eran, Mezhdunarodniki, pp. 135–6.
59
E.g. anon., ‘Postanovlenie CK KPSS: O zadačach partinoj propagandy v sovremennych
uslovijach i istoričestkaja nauka’, Voprosy Istorii 6 (1960), 3–9.
60
Gottemoeller and Langer, Foreign Area Studies in the USSR.
61
Zubok, Zhivago’s Children, pp. 88–120; Gottemoeller and Langer, Foreign Area Studies in
the USSR, p. 100.

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 New institutions and a new generation 251

prestigious positions for specialists. Along with academic institutions, the

International Department of the Central Committee of the CPSU, its
affiliated Institute of Social Sciences, the foreign ministry, the KGB, and
the military secret service GRU also all founded their own regional,
including Latin American, departments. Initially, leading positions in
these newly created institutions and departments were filled with func-
tionaries; Sergej Michajlov, formerly Anastas Mikojan’s secretary in the
foreign trade ministry and a dutiful diplomat, was appointed head of
the ILA.62 The founding director of the Latin American department at
the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences was Nikolaj Lavrov
(1915–89), like Michajlov a bureaucrat, a highly decorated officer in
the Red Army, a member of the state board for the Lenin Peace Prize
and a ‘loyal officer and patriot’, as he was remembered by his col-
leagues.63 The next generation of professional internationalists did not
share these military virtues to any great extent. These younger meždunar-
odniki were well educated and very ambitious and breathed new life into
Soviet academic and political institutions. Many of them had diplomas
from MGIMO and, from the mid 1950s, began their careers in the newly
created positions in the internationalist academic and political
institutions.
Some of the graduates from the ‘Spanish group’ at MGIMO have
already made their appearance in this book: Vasilij Čičkov (1925–), the
author of several novels and children’s books was sent, after his gradu-
ation, to Mexico and Central America as correspondent for Pravda and
was the very first Soviet to set foot in revolutionary Cuba in January
1959.64 Genrich Borovik (1929–), the Minsk-born Soviet star journal-
ist who wrote the first reportage from Cuba, and later reported
from New York as Novosti correspondent for many years, had
been his classmate at MGIMO. A third member of their group, the
future KGB agent Nikolaj Leonov, has already featured on several
occasions, too.
In what could be called a prosopography of Soviet internationalism
after Stalin, this section will present the professional biographies of
selected members of their cohort of alumni from MGIMO. Leonov,
and his colleagues Anatolij Šul’govskij, Karen Chačaturov, Sergej
(Sergo) Mikojan and Viktor Vol’skij, albeit from very different social

62
Korneev, ‘Svjazy Akademii nauk SSSR s Latinskoj Amerikoj’, 138.
63
N. Kalmykov and E. Larin, ‘Oficer, patriot, latinoamerikanist’, Latinskaja Amerika 4
(2001), 46–7; Nikolaj Matveevič Lavrov, obituary in Latinskaja Amerika 8 (1989),
141–2.
64
Mikojan, Anatomija Karibskogo krizisa, p. 49.

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 252 Desk revolutionaries

backgrounds, all had similar political convictions that characterised their

generation of academic intellectuals. Better than any institutional history
could, their individual careers exemplify how these regional specialists,
all born in the 1920s, carried their spirit of anti-Stalinist socialist inter-
nationalism into the newly founded institutions and departments, where
they began their careers in the mid 1950s.
Nikolaj Leonov (1928–), born to a family of peasants in Rjazan’ oblast,
had graduated from MGIMO in 1952. Briefly in the firing line of the
anti-cosmopolitan campaign, he was, although an excellent student,
assigned the least prestigious position for a meždunarodnik: an underpaid
administration job in the publishing house Editorial Progreso.65 The
majority of the staff there were Spanish refugees, whom Leonov
befriended, and from whom he picked up his fluency in authentic every-
day castellano. As the work proved very unsatisfying, he happily grabbed
the first opportunity to escape. Shortly after Stalin’s death, the foreign
ministry sent young experts for language training all over Europe. Leo-
nov applied and was accepted. However, Spain under dictator Francisco
Franco did not issue visas to Soviet citizens at the time, so Leonov was
sent for language studies to the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de
México (UNAM) and later to a traineeship at the Soviet embassy in
May 1953. On the ship that took him across the Atlantic, he began a
lifelong friendship with a young Cuban of a similar age, who was
returning from the preparatory meetings for the World Youth Festival
in Bucharest: Raúl Castro.
Leonov stayed in Mexico for three years, studied philology at UNAM
and acquired a full position at the embassy. He made friends with Raúl’s
brother Fidel and a young Argentine medical student by the name of
Ernesto Guevara, who addressed everyone around him with an Argen-
tine expression that would soon stick as his nickname: ¡che! (‘hey!’). The
group around the Castro brothers had, in a burst of juvenile megalo-
mania, attempted to stir a revolt by attacking barracks in eastern Cuba.
After some time in prison, they went into Mexican exile, and planned yet
another attempt to topple the Cuban caudillo Batista. When they were
arrested in the summer of 1956, the Mexican authorities found Leonov’s
visiting card from the Soviet embassy in Che Guevara’s pocket. Leonov
was dismissed from the foreign service and had to return to the publish-
ing house in Moscow. Still unfulfilled with his work there, he settled on
an academic career as a historian of Latin America at the Soviet Academy
of Sciences under Nikolaj Lavrov.

65
Leonov, Licholet’e, pp. 8–22.

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 New institutions and a new generation 253

Shortly after the Cuban Revolution in early 1959, Leonov was

summoned to the KGB headquarters on Lubjanka Square. The recep-
tion was heartier than he had feared: the secret service had learnt that he
knew the Castro brothers from Mexico. Desperate for information on
what was happening in the Caribbean, the secret service offered Leonov a
position as a KGB agent. All too aware of the repressive past of the Soviet
secret service, Leonov hesitated, but finally agreed, convinced that, some
years after Stalin’s death, things had changed for the better. ‘It was a time
of great optimism and confidence’, he recalled; ‘we had won the war,
Stalin’s repressions were over, we had conquered the cosmos, the con-
sumer situation was getting better, and Khrushchev’s optimism was
catching . . . Even though I still had bad associations with the building,
I entered the Lubjanka.’66
When, in late 1959, Anastas Mikojan went to Mexico and Cuba to
open the Soviet exhibitions (see Chapter 1), Leonov went along as
translator. In Havana, they met his old Cuban friends, who had suc-
ceeded in their apparently forlorn cause of revolution on the island.
Leonov now stayed in Mexico and replaced Aleksandr Alekseev as the
KGB’s man in Latin America. At the same time, he was an associated
founding member of the Institute of Latin America, where colleagues
and friends remembered him as ‘a bright, clever, serious and experienced
man . . . whose general’s shoulder straps did not spoil his character’.67
With great nostalgia, Leonov recalled from these days his friend and
patron, the master-spy-turned-historian, Iosif Grigulevič.68 Following
his role model, Leonov continued his academic writing throughout his
life as secret agent and published a series of books on the history of
Central America and of the Catholic Church in Latin America, and a
very gentle biography of the Panamanian caudillo Omar Torrijos. ‘In
science’, he recalled from the time of Brezhnev’s stagnation, ‘a certain
democratic spirit continued.’69 When he returned to Moscow in 1968,
Leonov made a career in the KGB administration; he became head of
the foreign espionage department in 1971 and, in the 1980s, head of the
analytical department and deputy head of the chief directorate, the
second most important post within the KGB structure.70
Leonov’s boss at the ILA, and successor of the functionary Sergej
Michajlov, was Viktor Vol’skij (1921–99). From a Lithuanian white-
collar family, he had been accepted to the first generation of students at

66 67
Ibid., pp. 40–1, 85, 93, 286. Mikojan, Anatomija Karibskogo krizisa, pp. 49–50.
68
Leonov et al., ‘El general Nikolai Leonov en el CEP’, 77, 87, 91.
69
Leonov, Licholet’e, p. 36.
70
Leonov et al., ‘El general Nikolai Leonov en el CEP’, 72.

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 254 Desk revolutionaries

the newly established MGIMO. He gained a reputation as a talented

economist and expert on capitalist countries firstly at MGIMO and, from
1959, also as a professor at Moscow State University. In 1966, he was
made director of the ILA, a position he would keep until after the
dismantling of the Soviet Union. Vol’skij was considered the ‘founder
of the modern school of Soviet Latin Americanists’ and wrote, among
more than 300 scientific works on Latin America, the standard works on
Soviet–Latin American relations.71 In 1970, he was appointed to the
council for developing countries at the Academy and later became a full
member of the Academy – the highest award in Soviet academia. Vol’-
skij’s academic reputation went beyond the USSR: he was a member of
the Peruvian, Dominican and Mexican geographical societies, was
awarded the Order of the Aztec Eagle, the highest decoration for foreign-
ers in Mexico, and won state prizes in Venezuela, Peru and Cuba.
Vol’skij held an honorary doctorate from universities in Barranquilla,
Havana and Lima and honorary citizenship of the cities of Jalapa, Gua-
dalajara, Quito and Rio de Janeiro.
The honour of the Mexican Aztec Order was awarded to yet another
Soviet historian: Anatolij Šul’govskij (1926–91). Born into a family of
Soviet intelligenty, he had graduated from MGIMO in 1953. For several
years, he worked in the Inostrannaja Literatura publishing house for
international literature. Michajlov called him to the newly founded Insti-
tute of Latin America in 1961, and he held a parallel position at IMEMO
from 1963 as well as one at the Politizdat publishing house. Fluent in
Russian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, English and French, Šul’govskij
wrote many scientific and popular scientific books on Simón Bolívar, on
the proletariat in Latin America, on the Mexican president Lázaro Cár-
denas (for which he received the Aztec Order) and especially on the role
of the army in Latin American states. For his research, Šul’govskij
travelled often and extensively to many parts of the Americas, ‘even
though the vlasti [those in power] time and again directly or indirectly,
for this reason or that’, thwarted his trips abroad. But Šul’govskij was far
from being a dissenter: it was he who made sure ideological premises of
the CPSU were followed at the ILA. He was ‘a child of the socialist
system, a Soviet historian’, but one who ‘did not try to confuse the
desired with reality’, a long-time colleague remembered in his obituary.72

71
Vol’skii, ‘Sovetskaja latinoamerikanistika’; Vol’skii, ‘The Study of Latin America in the
USSR’.
72
E. Dabagjan, ‘Anatolij Fedorovič Šul’govskij (1926–1991)’, Novaja i Novejšaja Istorija 5
(2007), 178–91; E. Dabagjan, ‘Jarkij i mnogogrannyj talant’, Latinskaja Amerika 4
(2001), 18–27; Anatolij Fedorovič Šul’govskij, obituary in Latinskaja Amerika 1
(1992), 140.

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 New institutions and a new generation 255

At the ILA, Šul’govskij worked for many years with Karen Chačaturov
(1927–2005), son of an Armenian intelligentsia family in Tbilisi that was
hit hard by the Great Terror of the 1930s.73 After his graduation from
MGIMO, Chačaturov worked as a journalist for the Soviet Army journals
Krasnyj Flot (The Red Fleet) and Kraznaja Zvezda (The Red Star) and
wrote his early articles, in best Stalinist pathos, from a Soviet battleship in
the Atlantic. In 1953, he covered the violent, CIA-sponsored overthrow
of the Guatemalan president Arbenz – and found the topic of his life. US
interventions in Latin America became Chačaturov’s academic special-
isation, and he wrote about them with such passion and fervour that,
until perestroika, he was denied visas to the United States and Canada
for conferences and to meetings of the Soviet–US society.
In 1957, Chačaturov was appointed press attaché at the Soviet
embassy in Uruguay, and he became head of the Sovinformbjuro/
Novosti in Latin America. From Uruguay, he regularly wrote for Litera-
turnaja Gazeta and local left newspapers. In addition, he organised visits
by Soviet journalists – Anatolij Sofronov from Ogonek, Adžubej from
Komsomolskaja Pravda, Nikolaj Gribačev from SSSR and Danil Krami-
nov from Pravda – during their trips through South America (see also
Chapter 2).74 Chačaturov stayed for five years, only interrupted for a
few months when he built up the Novosti office in post-revolutionary
Cuba, and summed up his experience of Uruguay for a broad Soviet
readership in a colourful little book that mixed depictions of the beauty of
the country with wild accusations of the local evil-doings of the
‘Yankees’.75
Once back in Moscow, Chačaturov began an academic career as
protégé of another ‘father figure’, the politician-turned-historian Ivan
Majskij, at both the ILA and Moscow State University, where he com-
pleted his dissertation in 1969. For his academic endeavours, he travelled
to almost all countries of the Americas (except Canada and the United
States), and he received awards in Chile and Venezuela. Having long
served as head of the Latin American section of Novosti, Chačaturov
became deputy president of the entire organisation in 1971, which made
him responsible for the activities of Novosti in the entire Third World. As
a professor at the diplomatic school of the foreign ministry and as a
leading žurnalist-meždunarodnik, he was a serious voice among Soviet
Latin Americanists. But it was especially thanks to his position in the

73 74
Chačaturov, Zapiski očevidca, p. 57. Ibid., pp. 10–25.
75
Karen Chačaturov, Urugvaj Segodnja (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Instituta Meždunarodnych
Otnošenij, 1962).

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 256 Desk revolutionaries

International Department of the Central Committee that this voice was

also heard at highest levels of politics.76
The last representative of this generation covered here is Sergo Miko-
jan (1929–2010). He graduated from MGIMO in 1952, and, after a
dissertation on India and Pakistan, joined IMEMO as scientific assistant
and editor of the journal Mirovaja Ekonomika i Meždunarodnye Otnošenija
(World Economy and International Relations). In early 1960, he trav-
elled with his father, the Armenian Old Bolshevik Anastas Mikojan, to
Cuba. Enthralled with the tropical revolution, young Mikojan became
friends with Che and Fidel, and decided to change the focus of his
scientific work to Latin America and especially Cuba. Sergo recalled
his own father as inspiration: ‘he was an internationalist of the old school,
it was part of his conception of himself . . . He belonged to a generation in
which many internationalist Jews were killed in Stalin’s purges, but he
himself stayed true to the cause.’77
Sergo Mikojan, after his conversion in Cuba, entered the ILA and later
edited the institute’s monthly journal Latinskaja Amerika. His back-
ground in the highest Soviet elite and his friendship with influential
members of the nomenklatura provided him with a security that allowed
him to be very experimental and open-minded in his editorial and
scientific work and enabled him to survive several attempts of both the
Propaganda Department of the Central Committee and the presidium of
the Academy to oust him as chief editor. One of the most reform-
oriented of the Soviet Latin Americanists, Sergo Mikojan was an out-
spoken critic of Stalin, whose terror had affected his family, too: his
father-in-law, Aleksej Kuznecov, had been the first secretary of the
CPSU in Leningrad and had been shot during the second Leningrad
affair in 1950. But Sergo was nonetheless a convinced socialist inter-
nationalist. Even in his post-Soviet recollections, he hailed the Cuban
revolutionaries and the comprometidos Pablo Neruda and David Siqueiros
as the great heroes of his life.78

Jews in Soviet area studies

The bulk of future leading meždunarodniki received their education from
MGIMO. Numerous Jewish students, however, no matter how talented,
were not accepted to its study programme. After 1953, many of them

76
Sergej Kisljak, ‘K ego sovetam prislušivalsja MID Rossii’, Latinskaja Amerika 9 (2005),
7; Chačaturov, Tri znaka vremeni; Blasier, The Giant’s Rival, p. 202.
77
Mikojan, Anatomija Karibskogo krizisa, p. 151.
78
Mikojan, Anatomija Karibskogo krizisa, p. 50; Mikojan, ‘Neuželi tridcat’ piat’ let?’

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 New institutions and a new generation 257

found their way into Latin American studies anyway, where they joined
an older generation of internationalists such as Zubok, Majskij and
Grigulevič – who were all from different Jewish backgrounds
themselves. Indeed, a large proportion of Latin Americanists in the
Soviet Union came from Jewish families, as is often evident from their
father’s names: the historian Boris (Moiseevič) Merin (1932–2007), at
the ILA from 1963, was an expert on social movements in Latin America
and a leading member of the Soviet solidarity committee with Latin
American countries. The anthropologist Abram (Davidovič) Dridzo
(1926–2003) was a researcher with a talent for poetry at the Academy
of Sciences; and Lev (Samojlovič) Ospovat (1922–2009) was the author
of several biographies of Latin American artists.
Two other Jewish historians stand out from the Thaw generation of
Soviet Latin Americanists: Moisej Al’perovič (1918–), son of a Jewish
insurance company agent from Moscow, graduated from Moscow State
University in 1941. After fighting in the Red Army for four years, and
working for the Soviet Military Administration in Germany, Al’perovič
finished a dissertation on Mexican–US relations. But as a Jew in the
Soviet Union in 1949, he was not allowed an academic position in
Moscow. The Soviet ministry of education sent him to the provincial
town of Rjazan’ instead, where he taught at the local pedagogical
university until he could return to the Soviet capital in 1954. He became
an expert on liberation movements in sixteenth- to nineteenth-century
Latin America at the Academy’s Institute of History. Al’perovič was
decorated with the Aztec Order, as well as with the title of honorary
doctor of the UNAM.79 He established his reputation with a series of
books on the history of Mexico and the United States and one on the
whole of Latin America, From Ancient Times to the Early Twentieth Cen-
tury. The latter book, co-authored with Lev Slezkin (1920–2012) became
a standard reference for all scholars. Slezkin himself had grown up in
Moscow’s bohemia of the 1920s in a Jewish intelligentsia household,
where his father, the author Jurij Slezkin, hosted illustrious friends such
as Mikhail Bulgakov, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Anatolij Lunačarskij.
Lev studied history at Moscow State University, finished his kandidats-
kaja in 1953 and found a position with Lavrov and Al’perovič at the
Academy’s section for the Americas. Al’perovič and Slezkin were rather
latitudinarian academics: both got into trouble several times with the
authorities for their writings on Latin American liberation movements.

79
Anon., ‘Jubilej Moiseja Samuiloviča Al’peroviča’, Novaja i Novejšaja Istorija 2 (2009),
214–16; Boris Koval’, ‘Korifej otečestvennoj latinoamerikanistiki: k 90-letiju Moiseja
Samuilovia Al’peroviča’, Latinskaja Amerika 9 (2008), 92–6.

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 258 Desk revolutionaries

They had their problems with Party dogma and hypocritical cowardice,
which still prevailed in Soviet academia, but they were convinced social-
ist internationalists, ‘Soviets in the non-official sense’, as a colleague
remembered.80
The high ratio of Jews in Soviet Latin Americanists is remarkable, and
so is the fact that almost all of them were purely academics, without the
ties to political institutions that most of their Slavic and Caucasian
colleagues had. Open discrimination and exclusion stopped after 1953,
but Jewish meždunarodniki were still obstructed from careers in more
influential positions. This subtle anti-Semitism went hand in hand with
an increasing rehabilitation of Stalin from the late 1960s, and Al’perovič
found a shrewd way to comment on this tendency. His book on the
nineteenth-century Paraguayan strongman José Gaspar Rodríguez de
Francia was clearly a parable on the recent history of the Soviet Union
and its dictator.81
Stalinist repression until 1953, and the remnants of Stalinism and anti-
Semitism throughout the 1960s and 1970s, did keep many Jews from
following higher careers in Soviet administrative jobs. It did not, how-
ever, result in a loss of their socialist ideals, as is shown by the life and
work of another Jewish-Soviet Latin Americanist, Kiva Majdanik
(1929–2006). He graduated from Moscow State University with a spe-
cialisation in Latin American history in 1951, with top grades, but at a
bad moment; the son of a renowned Jewish lawyer from Moscow did not
get a recommendation for an aspirantura. He was sent to provincial
Ukraine as a high school teacher. Only after the 20th Party Congress
was he allowed to return and begin his dissertation on the Spanish Civil
War, at the Academy of Sciences, under supervision of Ivan Majskij, who
had just been released from the Gulag.
From 1963, Majdanik lived in Prague as Latin America expert for
Problemy Mira i Socializma. The editing board of this international,
multi-language, communist journal, founded to replace the disbanded
structures of the Cominform, was a hub where Soviet intellectuals could
debate comparatively freely with socialists from all over the world – and
where they were sometimes inspired to express criticism of their own
state. Majdanik built up contacts and friendships with many Latin
American leftists during his work in Prague. In exchanges with the
Salvadorans Schafik Handal and Roque Dalton, and with the Dominican
Narciso Isa Conde, Majdanik developed a distinct revolutionary idea of

80
Boris Koval’, ‘K jubileju L’va Jur’eviča Slezkina’, Novaja i Novejšaja Istorija 3 (2010),
250–1.
81
Moisej Al’perovič, Revoljucija i diktatura v Paragvae (Moscow: Nauka, 1975).

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 New institutions and a new generation 259

socialism, often very critical of the Latin American communist parties

and the CPSU, which earned him the nickname of the ‘Soviet Che
Guevara’. For a while, Majdanik’s solo runs were tolerated, even though
Latin American communist parties time and again demanded he be
fired – which he was, after he publicly criticised the Soviet invasion of
Czechoslovakia in 1968.
Highly educated, worldly and fluent in Spanish, Portuguese, French,
English, Italian, German, Czech and Russian, Majdanik found a position
as a historian and political scientist at IMEMO afterwards. In his aca-
demic work, which was very unconventional by Soviet standards, he
dealt with Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Nicaragua and Venezuela, and with
workers’ and liberation movements all over the continent from an
unorthodox Marxist perspective. Majdanik even dared to use Trotskyist
terminology in his sharp criticisms of the rehabilitation of Stalin, and, in
the course of the 1970s, got increasingly into trouble with the authorities.
Some of his publications never made their way through the censors: a
foreword for his friend and fellow historian Michail Gefter was pulped,
along with the entire edition of the book on orders of the Central
Committee. A booklet on Ultra-Left Liberation Movements in Asia, Africa,
Latin America, which Majdanik circulated with a warning note ‘only for
internal use’, was nonetheless considered so dangerous that the leader-
ship of the Academy decided to burn it right away. What saved him from
worse was his network of friends, especially Sergo Mikojan, and promin-
ent communist foreigners in Moscow and Prague, including Dolores ‘La
Pasionaria’ Ibárruri, the exiled head of the Partido Comunista de España
(PCE), who at the time was developing from a hard-core Stalinist into a
more moderate socialist.

The meždunarodniki’s march through the Soviet institutions

The massive expansion of Soviet area studies on Latin America from the
mid 1950s, initiated in order to strengthen Cold War competitiveness,
provided hundreds and ultimately thousands of scholars with privileged
and well-funded workplaces. The members of the first generation of
these post-Stalin professional internationalists were male and born in
the 1920s. The meždunarodniki who later focused on Latin America
had experienced, during their childhood, the Spanish Civil War as a
great romantic cause for altruistic revolutionaries in a faraway and exotic
country, which was suddenly, through media and refugees, very present
in the lives of many of this generation. At the same time they lived
through the dread of Stalinist state terror at home, and they experienced,
soon thereafter, the horrors of the Second World War, either fighting

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 260 Desk revolutionaries

themselves as very young men, or witnessing their fathers and older

brothers fight, be wounded or die. Imperialism was no abstract threat
to them. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, they, as talented stu-
dents, got their higher education, most of them at the newly founded
MGIMO. Those with a Jewish family background were barred there until
1953 and experienced an institutionalised anti-Semitism also in the years
thereafter. These restraints notwithstanding, many Jewish students also
managed to get a good education and academic positions.
All meždunarodniki, Jewish or not, were multi-lingual, and they had –
in the Soviet Union a rarity at the time – experience of life abroad.
Chačaturov had spent many years living in Uruguay, Leonov more than
a decade in Mexico. Several others were born to Russian parents abroad
and moved to the Soviet Union to work for internationalist organisa-
tions.82 All of them were critical of Stalin, whose repression most of them
had felt among their family and friends. They thus welcomed
Khrushchev’s reforms and the denunciation of the dictator’s crimes.
‘Kiva had a high estimation of the 20th Party Congress’, remembered
Majdanik’s friend and biographer Narciso Isa Conde.83 Viktor Vol’skij
recalled that he finally convinced the censors to publish his dissertation,
which proposed a new look at the developing countries, thanks to a
reference to Khrushchev’s speech.84 Nikolaj Leonov, too, still admired
Khrushchev in his post-Soviet memoirs: ‘back in that day as today, I feel
great sympathy for this man, and I am sure that, with him, Russia lost its
last political leader of stature’.85
Relieved by the end of Stalinism and infected by Khrushchev’s polit-
icking and his swashbuckling optimism, all the meždunarodniki joined the
Communist Party. Sergo Mikojan criticised Stalin remarkably openly,
but never lost faith in the Party, whose ranks he joined in 1953, shortly
after the death of the dictator. Vol’skij was a member, and so were
Chačaturov and Šul’govskij, the latter not merely nominally, like anyone
in any relevant position in the USSR, but as an active politician. Even the
bustling Majdanik was in the Party – until he was thrown out. To be sure,
being a member of the CPSU was quasi-indispensible for any Soviet
citizen who wanted to travel abroad. But many young and well-educated
Soviets, the first generation born under the Soviet regime, did not join
the ranks of the CPSU after 1953 for these pragmatic reasons: at least

82
Pavel Nikolaevič Bojko, obituary in Latinskaja Amerika 6 (2007), 140; Chačaturov,
Zapiski očevidca, p. 45.
83
Narciso Isa Conde, Kiva Maidanik: humanidad sin límites y herejía revolucionaria (Santo
Domingo: Editora Tropical, 2007), p. 57.
84
A. Glinkin, ‘Slovo o druge’, Latinskaja Amerika 4 (2001), 11–17.
85
Leonov, Licholet’e, p. 93.

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 New institutions and a new generation 261

until the mid 1960s, many of them thought of themselves as a ‘vanguard

of a fair and egalitarian society’ and shared a sense among them of a need
to improve the Party from within.86
Leonov was – at least in hindsight – highly critical of Stalinism and
Soviet deficiencies such as the bureaucracy, the influence of the military,
careerism, nepotism and denunciation. Nonetheless, he was a dedicated
socialist and enrolled with the Komsomol and later the Party. Reflecting
on his relations with the Soviet powers in his post-Soviet memoirs,
Leonov claimed to have been always judicious, critical and without
ideological limitations. But he considered himself a convinced patriot
and communist, which were interchangeable terms for him: ‘my appre-
ciation of the Party and power structures was based on the fact that
I considered them my state, therefore my rodina [homeland]’.87 If the
Soviet Union followed a ‘revolutionary-imperialist’ paradigm, as Vladi-
slav Zubok claimed, then Leonov can be considered the embodiment of
this principle: a loyal and career-oriented civil servant to an empire,
whose geo-political interests he safeguarded by all means necessary.
Yet this imperialist stance was based on his political conviction, an
almost romanticist socialist internationalism: ‘I was an orthodox com-
munist and a loyal servant’, Leonov described himself in retrospect, and
claimed for his generation: ‘we were led by the belief that the fate of the
global conflict between capitalism and socialism would be decided in the
Third World’.88
From their teachers and father figures, socialist internationalists from
the 1920s, the meždunarodniki inherited their ideals. During their march
through old and new Soviet institutions, they carried this conviction with
all its initial romantic connotations, and their academic work often
reflected this stance. In Latin American history and politics, they found
a huge range of stories of national liberation movements, revolutions,
anti-western thought, anti-US struggle and workers’ movements, and
they included countless biographies of liberation heroes from José Martí
to Fidel Castro.89 The unconditional enthusiasm for the latter and for the
socialist prospects of Cuba and Latin America shows that, thanks to the
meždunarodniki, Soviet knowledge of Latin American past and present
had grown tremendously in the decade after 1953, but was still based on
clear ideological leanings and full of glorifying romanticism.

86
Zubok, Zhivago’s Children, pp. 34–6; Chačaturov, Zapiski očevidca, p. 72.
87
Leonov, Licholet’e, p. 22.
88
Zubok, A Failed Empire; Leonov, ‘La inteligencia soviética en América Latina’, 53, 85.
89
Al’perovič, Sovetskaja istoriografija stran Latinskoj Ameriki.

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 262 Desk revolutionaries

Cold War profiteers: the meždunarodniki and Soviet humanities

This resumption of socialist internationalism was a specifically Soviet
trend, but the institutionalisation of expertise on world regions was not.
The expansion of area studies was a northern-hemisphere phenomenon
in the 1950s and 1960s, when a rather similar culture of experts emerged
in the United States and, to some extent, in western and eastern Europe
at a similar time. The Cold War led governments on both sides of the
Iron Curtain not only to massively increase their military expenditure,
but also to stimulate technological development and invest in research
and education. The Soviets, as Mikojan’s references exemplify, took
inspiration for these institutes from the enemy camp, but influences also
happened in the other direction.
The contest with the Soviet Union, especially after its translocation
from Europe to the Third World, made government officials in Wash-
ington realise how little they themselves actually knew about many areas
of the world. Just as in the Soviet Union, centres of research were
founded in the United States, which brought together specialists from
different fields, historians, social scientists, linguists, anthropologists and
economists, who all had, or developed, specific knowledge on one area of
the world. For the first time, scholars participated in the making of US
foreign policy. Most urgently, the United States needed to know more of
the USSR itself and built up, more or less from scratch, an academic
armada of Sovietologists, who, more often than not, blurred the distinc-
tion between academic scholarship and politically partisan intelligence
analysis.90 But many other world areas were studied closely now, too,
and, most conspicuously, Latin American studies expanded tremen-
dously after the Cuban Revolution and the first Soviet inroads into the
region.91
In the United States as in the Soviet Union, a global foreign policy
needed expertise, and, to that end, the two countries expanded scientific
institutions and funded research in fields that had hitherto been

90
David C. Engerman, Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
91
Michael Adas, Dominance by Design: Technological Imperatives and America’s Civilizing
Mission (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006); Nils
Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Christopher Simpson (ed.),
Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences during the Cold War
(New York: New Press, 1998), p. 68; Laura Nader, ‘The Phantom Factor: Impact of
the Cold War on Anthropology’, in Noam Chomsky (ed.), The Cold War and the
University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years (New York: New Press,
1997), pp. 107–46; Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘The Unintended Consequences of Cold
War Area Studies’, in Chomsky (ed.), The Cold War and the University, p. 202.

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 New institutions and a new generation 263

neglected. In both, the political leadership considered academe a tool to

be used for their own advancement, but its professors sometimes saw
things differently. Even in the Soviet Union, some branches of the
humanities and the social sciences, without any obvious geo-political
relevance, were actually able to profit from the Cold War rivalry. The
lavish funds given to amass regional knowledge provided the liberal arts,
in particular those with a certain distance from ideology, with good
working conditions. Soviet anthropologists, geographers, art historians
and literary scholars were able to conduct research that was often on par
with that of their colleagues from the best western universities.
Rostislav Kinžalov (1920–2006), a scholar of the folklore of indigenous
America, was an internationally renowned and published expert on the
pre-Columbian art of Central America, which he presented in a series of
exhibitions to the Soviet audience from 1956. After a joint research
project with the linguist Jurij Knorozov (1922–99), who had laid the
foundation for the deciphering of the language of the ancient Maya,
and the mathematician Jurij Kosarev, who had contributed early com-
puter models, the team published a Russian–Maya dictionary in 1960.92
A precise cartography of Latin America was undertaken by Jakov Mašbic
(1928–97).93 Vladimir Kuz’miščev (1925–88), a cultural historian at the
ILA and professional internationalist at VOKS and the SSOD, translated
Latin American literature and wrote a series of best-selling historical
novels on the Maya (see Chapter 2).94 His colleague Jurij Zubrickij
(1923–2007), an expert on the pre-Columbian cultures of the South
American Andeans, was the first Russian to learn fluent Quechua,
which, as the Peruvian writer Francisco Miró Quesada recalled, always
made an incredible impression on people from that region.95 ‘Iuri el
Grande’, as he was called by his South American acquaintances, was
able to conduct his research on Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru thanks to the
positions he held at the ethnological department of the Academy of
Sciences. In addition to his research, he taught at Lumumba University,
gave language classes, wrote in Soviet popular magazines about his trips
and, from 1965, organised radio broadcasts in Quechua, Aymara and
Guaraní. Zubrickij was awarded honorary doctorates from two Peruvian
universities and was given the freedom of the city of Cuzco, former

92
Rostislav Vasil’evič Kinžalov, obituary in Latinskaja Amerika 9 (2006), 107–9; Al’perovič,
Sovetskaja istoriografija stran Latinskoj Ameriki, p. 24; E. Evreinov, Ju. Kosarev and V.
Ustinov, Primenenie elektronnych vyčislitel’nych mašin v issledovanim pis’mennosti drevnich
Majja (Novosibirsk: Izdatel’stvo Sibirskogo Otdelenija AN SSSR, 1961).
93
Torkunov (ed.), MGIMO Universitet, pp. 216–26.
94
Vladimir Aleksandrovič Kuz’miščev, obituary in Latinskaja Amerika 7 (1988), 143.
95
Miró Quesada, La otra mitad del mundo, p. 31.

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 264 Desk revolutionaries

capital of the Inca empire, and the state order of Peru. As well as his
academic feats, Zubrickij, an ‘in all respects non-mediocre human
being . . . a poet and dreamer, full of creativity’, as he was called in
Latinskaja Amerika’s normally rather sober obituaries, was an avid poet
himself and, thanks to an impressive linguistic knowledge, translated
poetry from languages that many people inside and outside the Soviet
Union had not even heard of, among them Georgian, Lithuanian,
Aymara, Guaraní, Quechua and Mapudungun.96
Other arts of modern Latin America also found advocates in the 1960s
Soviet Union thanks to the originally geo-political consideration of
knowledge expansion: the architect Vladimir Chajta (1933–2004), after
his graduation from the Moscow Institute of Architecture, took an inter-
est in Latin American construction methods and, as an affiliate to the
ILA, introduced the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer to the Soviet
Union.97 Georgij Stepanov (1919–86), a surviving veteran of the Spanish
Civil War, and head of the language and literature department of the
Academy of Sciences, became an internationally renowned linguist with
an expertise on the regional varieties of the Spanish language. Latin
American folk music got its own Soviet expert with Pavel Pičugin
(1932–) from the Institute of World Literature, who wrote regularly in
Sovetskaja Muzyka about the latest trends in Latino tunes, and published
sheet music and analyses of Latin American music.
The enormous popularity of Latin American literature in the Soviet
Union was due in no small part to Vera Kutejščikova (1919–2012). The
literary critic had begun her career at the department of the Americas at
VOKS in the 1940s. From 1956, she introduced and promoted Latin
American authors to a Soviet readership from her position at the Institut
Mirovoj Literatury imeni Gor’kogo (Gorky Institute of World Literature)
at the Academy of Sciences, where she, after a trip to Mexico in the same
year, organised the Latin American section and published her standard
work The Latin American Novel in the Twentieth Century.98 At the same
time, Kutejščikova occupied the position of editor at the newly founded
Spanish section of Progress publishing house, where she laid the founda-
tion for the boom in Latin American literature in the Soviet Union in the
1960s.99 Kutejščikova, too, found international recognition for her work
and was awarded the Aztec Order as well as an honorary degree of

96
Jurij Aleksandrovič Zubrickij, obituary in Latinskaja Amerika 6 (2007), 142–4.
97
Pamjati V. L. Chajta, obituary in Latinskaja Amerika 10 (2004), 92–3.
98
Vera Kutejščikova, Roman Latinskoj Ameriki v XX. veke (Moscow: Nauka, 1964).
99
V. Zemskov, ‘Ot izučenija literaturnogo processa k osmysleniju civilizacionnoj
paradigmy: latinoamerikanistika v Institute mirovoj literatury’, Latinskaja Amerika 4
(2001), 30–45; Kutejščikova, Moskva-Meksiko-Moskva.

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 The return of open academic debate and the fall of Allende 265

UNAM. Like many intellectuals of her generation, during the Thaw she
harboured an idealised notion of 1920s socialism and internationalism,
which they believed was still unsoiled by Stalin’s crimes. It was Eisen-
stein’s fascination for Mexico, Kutejščikova later remembered, that
kindled her interest in Latin America.100
By the late 1960s, the yawning Soviet gap in knowledge on Latin
America of the decade before was by and large closed. True, much Soviet
writing on contemporary history and political relations was embedded in
an ‘ideological framework . . . that annoys deeply’,101 as the US historian
Russell Bartley described it. But in other fields Soviet scholars delivered
highly qualified research that impressed him to the extent that he con-
ceded: ‘Soviet research on Latin America is at such an elevated level that
experts in the field who do not read Russian are in an unfortunate
position.’102 The ILA historians proudly quoted him in resumes of their
own work, but preferred not to echo the less enthusiastic comment.103

The return of open academic debate to Soviet area studies

and the fall of Allende
Ideological bias notwithstanding, the Soviet view of Latin America in the
late 1960s and early 1970s was significantly less stereotypical and hom-
ogenising than it had been a decade before. Researchers continuously
published ever more detailed studies on many aspects of the past and
present of most states of the subcontinent. This included political move-
ments, their stances towards the Third World, the Catholic Church, the
armed forces and the trades unions as well as the great variations between
countries and social strata within them. This differentiation of knowledge
brought back a degree of cautious debate into Soviet academe. Always
within a Marxist-Leninist conception of history, Soviet scholars now
offered competing interpretations of Latin American developments. Sci-
entific journals published articles that still used cautious wording and
never directly opposed an individual scholar or a policy, but, for an
informed reader, clearly argued against other opinions.104

100
Kutejščikova, Moskva-Meksiko-Moskva, pp. 20–2, 90.
101
Russell H. Bartley, ‘A Decade of Soviet Scholarship in Brazilian History: 1958–1968’,
Hispanic American Historical Review 50/3 (1970), 465.
102
Russell H. Bartley, ‘On Scholarly Dialogue: The Case of US and Soviet Latin
Americanists’, Latin American Research Review 1 (1970), 60; Oswald, ‘Contemporary
Soviet Research on Latin America’, 91.
103
Vol’skii, ‘Sovetskaja latinoamerikanistika’, 13; Al’perovič, Sovetskaja istoriografija stran
Latinskoj Ameriki, pp. 64–5.
104
Prizel, Latin America through Soviet Eyes.

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 266 Desk revolutionaries

Two episodes confirm that the obsequiousness of Soviet academe had

given way to a cautiously critical stance. In 1965, the director of the ILA
was redeployed, and the academic staff was afraid of being allocated a
clueless nomenklatura man as successor. So they voted for one themselves
and suggested him to the Central Committee, which sent a representa-
tive, who sharply rebuked this insubordination. But the upshot was that
they got the director they asked for, Viktor Vol‘skij.105 In addition, the
meždunarodniki’s reactions to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in
1968 were not all in line with the regime. Vera Kutejščikova recalled: ‘my
contemporaries would never again forget that day; we were overwhelmed
by feelings of shame and despair’; and she compared the crushing of the
Prague Spring with the violence against protesting students in Mexico
City the same year.106 Kiva Majdanik, in Prague during these events,
criticised the Soviet course of action publicly – and lost his job for this
insolence. And even the conservative Anatolij Šul’govskij, within the
walls of the ILA, made no secret of his sympathies for Alexander Dubček
and his disapproval of the invasion.107
Increased self-awareness among academics fomented discussion, at
the level of politics as much as academically, as did another factor:
institutional competition. The expansion of area studies created a rivalry
between historians of the ILA and the Academy’s history department,
each group indirectly claiming to be more professional and modern than
the other.108 With the end of the somewhat naive enthusiasm in the
Third World for the Thaw, experts sometimes felt the need to validate
their raison d’être and to justify their further existence. Nikolaj Leonov
recalled that his Latin American department of the KGB often took
initiatives only ‘to prevent being aborted’.109 By the same token, the
ILA also made sure officials knew of the advances the Cold War enemy
was making in the field of area studies and, in 1970, published an
anthology of Latin American studies abroad.110
The substantially increased knowledge, cautious criticism and an
atmosphere of competitiveness brought something back to academic life
in the Soviet Union that had been severely restricted during Stalinism:
relatively open academic debate. While differentiation and qualitative
improvement happened everywhere in Soviet area studies, none of the

105
Glinkin, ‘Slovo o druge’. 106
Kutejščikova, Moskva-Meksiko-Moskva, p. 213.
107
Dabagjan, ‘Anatolij Fedorovič Šul’govskij (1926–1991)’; Dabagjan, ‘Jarkij i
mnogogrannyj talant’.
108
Oswald and Carlton (eds.), Soviet Image of Contemporary Latin America.
109
Andrew and Mitrokhin, The World Was Going Our Way, p. 65.
110
Vol’skii, ‘Sovetskaja latinoamerikanistika’; Institut Latinskoj Ameriki (ed.), Zarubežnye
centry po izučenuju Latinskoj Ameriki (Moscow: ILA RAN, 1970).

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 The return of open academic debate and the fall of Allende 267

published Soviet debates on the outside world was more sophisticated

than the one dealing with Latin America. The quick establishment of a
hitherto hardly existing field gave many young scholars academic oppor-
tunities that they took up with enthusiasm and optimism. Moreover,
since Latin America had only minor relevance in geo-political terms to
the Soviet Union, academics were relatively free of direct political
responsibility.111

Progressive vs conservative scholars

By the late 1960s, there were differing opinions in Soviet academia on the
stage of development that capitalism had reached in Latin America.
Based on these interpretations, there were different stances towards the
support of left populists, left military regimes, communist parties and
alternative socialist movements. Two lines of thought evolved in the
Soviet debate, represented by two groups of scholars, who, for lack of
better terms, will be called here ‘conservatives’ and ‘progressives’. Con-
servatives were those who were most loyal to the Soviet state and its
official policies; progressives instead took a stand for international social-
ism, and, for that matter, Latin American revolutionary movements. In
the centre of all debates on the Third World in general and Latin
America in particular was the question of violent revolutionary struggle:
the official Soviet position condemned it, and being associated with ‘left
extremism’ or even ‘Maoism’ could still bring people serious trouble in
the late 1960s. However, there was the successful example of Cuba,
which gave some Latin Americanists leverage to openly and publicly
propose revolutionary struggle on the continent. Anything remotely
critical of Soviet policies still had no chance of getting published, so the
discussants always referred to foreign groups with a certain leaning; if
scholars wanted to express their condemnation of support for revolution-
ary groups, they would not point fingers at the International Department
of the CPSU, but instead criticised the left radicalism of foreign socialists
such as Régis Debray. By the same token, criticism of Soviet support for
anti-communist populists was expressed only indirectly, as through the
repudiation of an article in a foreign newspaper.
The meždunarodniki of the ILA were usually in the conservative camp
in these debates, and Šul’govskij and Vol’skij, as the leading historians of
the institute, were its spokesmen. In a speech at a 1969 Third World
conference in Frunze, Šul’govskij summed up his rather conformist

111
Jerry F. Hough, ‘The Evolving Soviet Debate on Latin America’, Latin American
Research Review 16/1 (1981), 125.

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 268 Desk revolutionaries

political stance: the main road to socialism was still ‘non-capitalist

development’ (see Chapter 1). Central Asia, certainly not coincidentally
the venue for the event, was still to serve as a role model. The revolution
had won in a highly developed country (in his view, Soviet Russia);
backward countries, by implication, could leapfrog the phase of capital-
ism by being inspired and helped by the socialist motherland (‘Marxism-
Leninism, that is the sentiment of historical optimism plus the experience
of the peoples of the Soviet Union’). This was only possible via the
working class, represented by the respective communist parties, which
did not exclude the possibility that, in the first place, a national liberation
movement or military rule might lead the way (as in Cuba and Peru
respectively). Many paths were possible: whoever denied that, like the left
extremists, only played into the hands of imperialism. Šul’govskij drew
parallels between the collaboration with different ‘anti-imperialist forces’
and the (actually rather short-lived) support for Muslim movements in
early 1920s Central Asia. He denounced Maoist theories of an urban vs
rural opposition, called dependency theory ‘far from objective reality’
and ‘latently racist’ and said Che Guevara’s foco theory was ‘refuted by
history’.112
In the 1970s, Šul’govskij no longer considered Latin America a part of
an imperialism-stricken Third World and compared it to southern
Europe rather than Asia and Africa. In a book co-written with his ILA
colleagues Boris Koval’ and Sergej Semenov, he suggested the concept of
zavisimyj kapitalizm (dependent capitalism) for the further study of Latin
America.113 This was apparently too conservative even for the ILA. For a
while, Vol’skij did not allow the book to leave the walls of the institute;
later, the authors got into trouble with the censors at the publishing
house. When the book finally came out, however, it did establish a new
theory ‘from below’ that was discussed rather openly in the Soviet
scientific community.
On the progressive side of the debates, scholars discussed dependency
theory and later liberation theology with more goodwill. Ostensibly
generally condemning certain foreign groups, they criticised the support
of populists and military regimes, as in Brazil or Peru, and hinted at the
revolutionary potential in some Latin American regions.114 These pro-
gressives, with Majdanik and Al’perovič the most latitudinarian amongst
them, not only proposed more active support for Latin American

112
Šul’govskij, ‘Latinskaja Amerika i opyt respublik Sovetskogo Vostoka’, 86–8.
113
Boris Koval’, Sergej Semenov and Anatolij Šul’govskij, Revoljucionnye processy v
Latinskoj Amerike (Moscow: Nauka, 1974).
114
Hough, ‘The Evolving Soviet Debate on Latin America’, p. 89.

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 The return of open academic debate and the fall of Allende 269

‘liberation movements’, but they also complained about the prevailing

constraints within Soviet academia: in 1968, Al’perovič, after outlining
the successes of Soviet area studies, could cautiously criticise the ‘mech-
anical interpretation of historical processes’ by more conventional Soviet
historians – again without giving names – and their lack of dialogue with
non-Marxist historians.115

The debate on Allende’s fall

The end of the Chilean Frente Popular under Salvador Allende in
1973 caused the biggest clash between ‘conservatives’ and ‘progressives’
in Soviet academe. Official foreign policy towards Allende had been
contradictory. Three years before, he had become the world’s first
democratically elected Marxist president. On the one hand, his victory
seemed to finally prove what the Soviets had been preaching to the
worldwide left for more than a decade: a peaceful path to socialism was
feasible. Ponomarev, the head of the International Department, saw the
election as a ‘revolutionary blow to imperialism’.116 Allende was cele-
brated in the Soviet press accordingly, headlined in the newspapers and
hailed on Soviet television.117 There was a coming and going of repre-
sentatives of Chilean government members to Moscow. In 1972, a
contract was signed that arranged exchanges in the fields of public health,
education, media, sports and arts, and Aeroflot scheduled a weekly flight
to Santiago, the first one to South America.118 Yet the enthusiasm was a
far cry from the Cuban craze a decade earlier. Most importantly, there
was hardly any financial support.
Allende went himself later that year, together with the head of the
communist party, Luis Corvalán; again, they were celebrated as great
socialist heroes, but they had to return almost empty-handed. Although
they bargained with their contacts with China, their requests for sorely
needed credits were met only with restraint – the Soviets gave a one-off
US$ 20 million loan, but could never have afforded yet another tremen-
dously expensive friend like Castro’s Cuba.119 Scholars as much as
politicians harboured serious doubts from the beginning as to whether
the regime could prevail. Economically, Chile was irrelevant for the
Soviets: the main export material, copper, was abundant in the USSR.

115
Al’perovič, Sovetskaja istoriografija stran Latinskoj Ameriki, p. 31.
116
Quoted in Prizel, Latin America through Soviet Eyes, p. 163.
117 118
Izvestija, 27 Oct.–5 Nov. 1970. Pravda, 4 Mar. 1972.
119
Pravda and Izvestija, 10 Dec. 1972; Theodore Shabat, ‘Allende Arrives in Soviet, Seeks
New Aid for Chile’, New York Times, 7 Dec. 1972.

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 270 Desk revolutionaries

For Soviet foreign policy, cautious not to disturb détente with the United
States, Chile offered no advantages either – hence there was only mild
disappointment in the Soviet foreign ministry when Allende was over-
thrown and killed himself. Massive economic difficulties and attacks
from leftist guerrillas had debilitated the Frente Popular, and it had lost
the support of the majority of Chileans by the time that, in 1973, the
supreme commander of the Chilean army, General Augusto Pinochet,
led a putsch and installed himself as new president.
Interestingly, officials in the Soviet Union found no fault with the
United States for these events. US media had been reporting for two
weeks on the active role of the CIA and the State Department in the
putsch, before Pravda tepidly mentioned ‘allegations concerning US
involvement’.120 Brezhnev called the events a ‘bloody fascist coup’,121
but did not refer to external influences. Ponomarev reminded his com-
rades that the Bolsheviks, unlike the Frente Popular, survived their
revolution because they managed to get the economy running. Šulgovskij
blamed Allende for being too straightforward with his reforms and
defended the cautious Soviet position towards Chile. Michail Kudačkin,
head of the Latin American department of the Central Committee, found
fault with the left radicals and their lack of discipline, which had pushed
the middle classes into the camp of the reactionaries.122 East European
and Soviet scholars agreed at a conference at the Academy: Allende’s
Frente Popular was unprepared, and its own domestic policy caused its
demise. Tellingly, the only ones in Soviet debates who blamed the
United States for Allende’s fall were not Soviets: Cheddi Jagan,
founding father of Guyana and long-time admirer of the Soviet Union,
and the Bolivian communist Nina Tadeo, in an issue of Problemy Mira i
Socializma.123
Those inside and outside the Soviet Union who still believed in the
prospects of world socialism learned a momentous lesson: a peaceful
path to socialism was possible, but to stay in power socialists needed to
be able to defend themselves. Among ‘progressive’ and ‘conservative’
Soviet academics, heated debates broke out in the wake of the Chilean
putsch. For the first time, divergent opinions were discussed publicly.
Majdanik, the ‘Soviet Che Guevara’, wrote an article that criticised the
reluctant Soviet foreign policy towards Chile. In order to get this
reproach published, he had to disguise it: the New York Times had written

120 121
Prizel, Latin America through Soviet Eyes, p. 164. Quoted ibid., p. 27.
122
Michail Kudačkin, ‘Algunas enseñanzas de la revolución chilena’, Latinskaja Amerika 1
(1975), 80–8.
123
Prizel, Latin America through Soviet Eyes, p. 166.

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 The return of open academic debate and the fall of Allende 271

that the nationalisation of banks and industries had brought about

Allende’s downfall; Majdanik protested that, on the contrary, the defer-
ential inclusion of ‘bourgeois circles’ had proved fatal for Chile’s social-
ism – clearly a criticism more of Soviet foreign policy than of US
journalists. At the ILA, during the preparations for a Chile special edition
of Latinskaja Amerika, ‘conservatives’ and ‘progressives’ could not agree
on a common position, which, in Soviet tradition, they were expected to
take in any publication. Mikojan remembered: ‘we had problems from
the very beginning with the press administration . . . it was dominated by
a generation of ideological dogmatists. I was told once in the Central
Committee: “is it worth debating questions, about which we still have no
established opinion?”. . . Back then, discussion usually looked like this:
“comrade X is correct to say. . . I come round to the opinion of comrade
Y” . . . We wanted to do things completely differently.’124
In the aftermath of the Chilean putsch, Majdanik denounced not only
Soviet passivity, but also Allende for not being determined enough
against his adversaries. His colleague Evgenij Kosarev, by contrast,
argued in his paper ‘Against Revolutionary Romanticism and Illusions’
that the Chilean socialists had shown a lack of patience and discipline
and had acted hastily. Mikojan, his colleagues’ qualms and the censors’
initial ‘Nyet’ notwithstanding, now called for what was a complete
novelty in Soviet sciences: in the very same edition of the journal, two
articles were to be published that held completely opposite opinions on
the same issue. ‘The editorial team protested vehemently,’ Mikojan
recalled, ‘but I wanted to create an interesting and newsworthy issue
and present arguments to the reader that allowed him to form his own
opinion.’
Until he managed to follow through with this first pinch of pluralism
in Soviet press, Mikojan had had to endure long debates and fights
with his bosses at the ILA and with the directory of the Academy of
Sciences, threaten resignation and continue the struggle with the Propa-
ganda Department of the Central Committee and the Glavlit censors
at the printing plant. His friend Nikolaj Leonov, the KGB’s man for
Latin America, helped him over these hurdles. Finally, as with any
ILA publication, the issue still had to be approved by the Central
Committee’s Latin American department, ‘the court of last resort’, as
Mikojan called it. Luckily for him, the historians Vasilij Ermolaev and
Michail Kudačkin were in charge there. Both were relatively unorthodox
scholars – and close friends of Mikojan. Thanks to his perseverance and

124
Mikojan, ‘Neuželi tridcat’ piat’ let?’, 29–31.

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 272 Desk revolutionaries

his excellent contacts with high-ranking Party members, Sergo Mikojan

won through, and the issue appeared.125
The animated debate around Allende, and in particular around his fall,
shows just how much the Soviet perception of Latin America had
changed. The enormous, and still somewhat naive, enthusiasm for the
Cuban Revolution and the ostensible prospects of socialism in continen-
tal Latin America around 1960 had given way to a diversity of rather well-
informed voices that drew different conclusions of the Chilean events.
The Allende discussion, and Sergo Mikojan’s role in it, also shows that
the tolerance towards diverging opinions that could be uttered publicly in
the late Soviet Union depended significantly on the personal network of
the one uttering them.

The political impact of Soviet area studies and support

for the Sandinistas in Nicaragua
Occasional tolerance of diverging opinions in smaller circles of academ-
ics notwithstanding, the autocratic Soviet leaders persisted in a state
ideology that claimed a predominance of politics over all other aspects
of society including the sciences. It is an unresolved and difficult ques-
tion of whether, under these circumstances, the meždunarodniki had any
impact on Soviet foreign policy making at all. As has been propounded,
the original motivation for building up a refined system of area studies
and acquiring knowledge of the world abroad was a political one: in times
of global conflict, Soviet foreign policy decision makers needed expertise
on distant world regions. The academic institutions had to deliver this
knowledge, and they were given lavish funds and good working condi-
tions to this end. It was institutions such as the ILA and IMEMO which
supplied the Central Committee, the foreign ministry and the KGB
with – secret – briefings on world areas.126 First-hand information on
world affairs was a rare commodity in the USSR. The meždunarodniki,
thanks to their travels, personal connections and access to different
sources of information, often knew their countries of study much better
than political decision makers and could thus, through their representa-
tion of the outer world, manipulate what the decision makers thought of
certain conflict situations.127

125
Mikojan, Anatomija Karibskogo krizisa, p. 50; anon., ‘Vokrug urokov Čili’, Latinskaja
Amerika 5 (1974).
126
Leonov et al., ‘El general Nikolai Leonov en el CEP’, 72; Cobb, ‘National Security
Perspectives of Soviet “Think Tanks”’, 53–4.
127
Fazio Vengoa, ‘América Latina Vista por los Académicos Soviéticos’, also argues along
these lines.

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 The political impact and support for the Sandinistas 273

This power factor should not be overestimated. Soviet foreign policy

was formulated within a very small circle of Politburo members, and
scholars would be unlikely to present opinions that were too controver-
sial directly to the top decision makers. This hierarchy was just as
pronounced between the KGB and academe: Leonov recalled how diffi-
cult it was to work with the professors from IMEMO, simply because
they were deeply afraid of the secret service.128 Some western observers
thus drew the conclusion that: ‘academics are very seldom contacted by
officials . . . [they] were perceived as party propagandists and often will-
ingly acted as such’.129 Others stated that Soviet academics had ‘hardly
any influence on politics’.130
A look at the Soviet Latin Americanists suggests, however, that the
meždunarodniki did influence the Soviet stance towards the world to
some extent, if not so much at highest levels of foreign policy making.
It was not their briefing of the most important decision makers, and
certainly not their books and articles, that left a political mark. Those
Latin Americanists who confined themselves to purely academic work
had very little impact outside universities, and it is probably safe to
assume that their research was not acknowledged by anyone in the
Politburo. Yet, due to their constant fluctuation between different aca-
demic institutions and bodies of the Soviet state, the meždunarodniki
carried their internationalist esprit into higher levels of the Soviet
administration.
Academics from Moscow State University and IMEMO often turned
to broader area studies at the ILA, and taught at MGIMO, Moscow State
University or Lumumba University. Others moved from area studies into
international journalism. Furthermore, the bulk of meždunarodniki
shared their internationalist expertise with other Soviet organisations
and were involved in, or contributed out of conviction to, Soviet political
and economic activities. All state and Party organs that dealt with cul-
tural diplomacy drew on the staff of area studies and their network of
contacts. The old master spy Grigulevič now held positions at the ILA
and the Latin America sections of both the GKKS and the SSOD.
Aleksandr Alekseev came originally from the secret services, too. From
1958, he headed the Latin American section of the GKKS and, as a
correspondent for TASS, reported from the Cuban Revolution as one of
the first Soviets in the country, and entered the diplomatic service. Many
more Soviet meždunarodniki provided counselling, contacts and transla-
tions for Soviet–Latin American business transactions and political

128
Leonov, Licholet’e, pp. 138–9. 129
Davidson and Filatova, ‘African History’, p. 118.
130
Blasier, ‘The Soviet Latin Americanists’.

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 274 Desk revolutionaries

relations: the historian Anatolij Glinkin, head of the foreign policy

section of the ILA, and Marklen Lazarev, the deputy director of the
ILA, were both lecturers at MGIMO, at Moscow State University and
Lumumba University – and they were both counsellors to the Soviet
foreign ministry.131
The interchange of expert staff between the different internationalist
organs and institutes was indeed impressive. Most meždunarodniki had
their academic jobs, but worked as well for media, for government
agencies, for the Party organisation, the military and intelligence services
and in missions abroad, commercial enterprises and international
exchange organisations. Some of the Latin Americanists forged careers
that took them into elevated posts in the Soviet administration. It was
through these power positions and their personal contacts that some
made their voices heard. Chačaturov, in parallel with his academic work
at ILA and MGIMO, pursued a career in the Sovinformbjuro/Novosti;
he eventually became the deputy director of the news agency TASS and
worked in the Latin American section of the International Department of
the Central Committee. Others held positions in the academic branches
of the CPSU, such as the History Department of the Central Committee,
and had therefore at least an indirect influence on how future decision
makers would perceive the world.132
Leonov worked his way up from being an assistant in a publishing
house for international literature to serving as a historian at the Academy,
finally to deputy head of the KGB, head of its strategic department and a
member of the Soviet defence council. Through such positions, some of
the meždunarodniki exercised a certain influence on Soviet politics. Yet,
while someone like Chačaturov certainly had considerable influence on
the Third World strategies of TASS (and others on their respective
organisations), their impact on the highest realms of Soviet foreign policy
was still limited; more often than not, their calls for more internationalist
activities fell on deaf ears. Leonov recalled writing countless suggestions
on how to improve Soviet Third World policy in reports ‘that never made
it beyond [KGB boss] Jurij Andropov’s desk’.133

131
Torkunov (ed.), MGIMO Universitet, pp. 216–26; Mikojan, Anatomija Karibskogo
krizisa, pp. 18–19; Chačaturov, Zapiski očevidca, pp. 37–8; Blasier, ‘The Soviet Latin
Americanists’, 109–10; anon., ILA. Instituto de América Latina: 30 años 1961–1991
(Moscow: ILA, n.d.).
132
Anon., ‘"O vremeni i o sebe": k 75-letiju Borisa Iosifoviča Koval’ja’, Latinskaja Amerika
6 (2005), 72–9; Vasilij Ermolaev, Nacional’no-osvoboditel’noe i rabočee dviženie v stranach
Latinskoj Ameriki posle vtoroj mirovoj vojny: lekcii, pročitannye v Vysšej partijnoj škole pri
CK KPSS (Moscow: Vysšaja Partijnaja Škola pri CK KPSS, 1958).
133
Leonov et al., ‘El general Nikolai Leonov en el CEP’, 72, 83.

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 The political impact and support for the Sandinistas 275

The politically most influential Soviet Latin Americanist was Michail

Kudačkin, and he, too, like Leonov, succeeded not through his academic
writing, but due to his institutional involvement. He was the head of the
Central Committee’s Latin American department, where he was in
charge of more than thirty regional experts. Academically, Kudačkin
never reached the fame of others in the field. Yet politically, he was the
crucial person for everyone writing about and dealing with Latin Amer-
ica. Thanks to his position in the Central Committee, he sat directly at
the interface of science and politics. In the strictly hierarchical Soviet
system of governance, he was the highest-ranking expert about the con-
tinent, the source of information for everyone in the Central Committee
and, through personal contacts, linked to decision makers in the Polit-
buro, whose members were briefed personally by representatives of the
International Department on the fields of their respective expertise.
Sources on Kudačkin’s interactions with the power brokers are scarce,
unfortunately, but it is clear that, through his access to the inner circle of
Soviet foreign policy making, Kudačkin had more influence than any
other meždunarodnik on Soviet policies towards Latin America.134
A fine case through which to study the attempts of other internationalist-
minded academics to exert influence on Soviet politics, and the limits
thereof, are the political upheavals in Central America and the Caribbean
in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Without any interference from
Moscow, the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, whose clan had
been ruling and exploiting the small and impoverished republic since
the 1930s, was toppled in 1979. The Marxist Frente Sandinista de
Liberación Nacional (FSLN) under Daniel Ortega emerged as the
strongest force in the anti-Somoza coalition and established a revolution-
ary government. From the same year, the ideologically similar Frente
Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN) in neighbouring
El Salvador started fighting its own provisional government. The Soviet
government harboured serious doubts about the endurance of both
revolutionary movements, and, aware of the proximity of the United
States, initially restrained from any direct interference.
The more ‘progressive’-oriented meždunarodniki, however, remem-
bered the Chilean case – and this time they not only started the usual
cultural exchange programme and Sunday speeches, but also spoke up
for sending weapons, technicians and military advisers. Leonov
immediately travelled to Managua and, upon return to Moscow,

134
Michail Fedorovič Kudačkin, obituary in Latinskaja Amerika 11 (2010), 104; www.
warheroes.ru/hero/hero.asp?Hero_id=12404 (last accessed 22 Nov. 2011); Blasier, The
Giant’s Rival, p. 71.

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 276 Desk revolutionaries

canvassed Soviet foreign policy makers for more substantial support. The
Sandinistas Humberto Ortega and Tomás Borge went to the Soviet
Union in 1981 and asked for more help, as did FMLN leader Schafik
Handal. Majdanik, his old friend from Prague, put Leonov in contact
with decision makers, and even collected and donated his own money for
the revolutionary cause. Yet when the Soviet government finally did send
support to Nicaragua, it was only a fraction of what the meždunarodniki
and their Latin American comrades had demanded.135
To save resources, the Kremlin delegated some tasks to its east Euro-
pean satellites: GDR experts trained and supplied Nicaraguan secret
service personnel, Czechoslovakia sent money and equipment, Bulgaria
provided aircraft training, Poland donated helicopters.136 Yevgeny Yev-
tushenko was sent to Managua for some poetic expressions of solidarity,
and Soviet school children collected donations for their young Central
American comrades. Alarms went off in Washington, but the extent of
assistance from the eastern bloc actually never came close to a substantial
level that would have approached the support that Ronald Reagan had
the CIA send to the Contra rebels.137 The amount of support for the
New Jewel Movement, a heterogeneous group of leftists in Grenada, a
small Caribbean island-state, was also negligible. Contacts with the
Soviet Union served more as a pretext for a full-blown US invasion and
regime change in Grenada in 1983.138
While they occasionally managed to initiate Soviet endeavours in the
Third World, the meždunarodniki just as often rallied in vain for their
ideals. At the political level, internationalism was tamed and subordin-
ated to geo-political interests of an often very pragmatic leadership. But
as a conviction among academics, Soviet internationalism after Stalin

135
Westad, The Global Cold War, pp. 339–48; Isa Conde, Kiva Maidanik; Leonov,
Licholet’e; Prizel, Latin America through Soviet Eyes, p. 147.
136
Michael Radu, ‘Eastern Europe and Latin America’, in Mujal-León (ed.), The USSR
and Latin America, pp. 261–2.
137
Nicola Miller, Soviet Relations with Latin America, 1959–1987, p. 202; Richard
Feinberg, ‘Central America: The View from Moscow’, Washington Quarterly 2 (1982),
173.
138
These cases were the last ones in which the Soviet Union had a large impact on Latin
America; over decades, they had provided the United States with justification for most
of its interventions in the region. In Guatemala in 1954, in Brazil in 1964 and in the
Dominican Republic the year after, in Chile in 1973 and, finally, in Grenada in 1983,
the United States actively participated in the violent overthrow of legitimate regimes – to
mention only those that took place during the Cold War. It tried but failed in Cuba in
1961, in Guyana in 1963, in Chile in 1970 and in Nicaragua in the early 1980s. The
cruel civil war in Guatemala, on a related note, no longer got much attention from
either the United States or the Soviet Union by that time. Instead, pariah states such as
the military junta-ruled Argentina and apartheid South Africa supported the anti-
communist fight. See Grow, US Presidents and Latin American Interventions.

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 The meždunarodniki as banner-bearers 277

persisted until the Soviet Union imploded. Occasionally, this socialist

idealism even became a nuisance for the Soviet state. Majdanik’s
activities had long raised suspicion among the authorities, who regu-
larly wire-tapped his telephone. During Handal’s 1980 visit, Majdanik
met him together with two of his young scholars from IMEMO, Andrej
Fadin and Tatjana Vorožejkina. Handal delivered a blazing speech
about the prospects for socialism in El Salvador, on which Fadin, even
more a leftist than his academic mentor, commented trenchantly: ‘this
is all very well with your heroic struggle, but I may ask Comrade
Schafik: all these sacrifices, these values, these political possibilities,
all this heroism – only to finally live in the same shit system as we do
here in the USSR??’ Majdanik later made the mistake of mentioning
this incident in a phone call to Handal. Fadin was arrested and sen-
tenced for being part of the molodye socialisti (young socialists), a group
taking inspiration from the western New Left and Eurocommunism.
Majdanik was excluded from the CPSU on the grounds of ‘unauthor-
ised contacts with foreigners’ (with Handal, the head of a communist
party) and anti-Soviet conspiracy. He also lost his position at IMEMO
until he was readmitted after Brezhnev’s death two years later; he was
however, never appointed professor and lost his permission to travel
abroad.139

The meždunarodniki as banner-bearers of Soviet

internationalism after Stalin
With the revival of Soviet internationalism after Stalin, and parallel with
very similar endeavours in the West, the USSR built up a refined system
of area studies. It had two major impacts on science, politics and the
higher administration: firstly, it expanded tremendously what the Soviets
knew about the rest of the world and replaced the hyper-ideologised and
schematised global mental map of late Stalinism with detailed regional
expertise and a fair knowledge of world affairs; secondly, it provided the
institutional framework for the survival of internationalist ideas in the late
Soviet Union. The professional biographies of the Latin Americanists
demonstrated that many scholars, having drawn their inspiration from an
older generation of socialist internationalists, conveyed their renewed
spirit of internationalism into both newly founded and old Soviet insti-
tutions. The meždunarodniki thus became the banner-bearers of Soviet
internationalism in the late Soviet Union.

139
Isa Conde, Kiva Maidanik, pp. 50–1.

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 278 Desk revolutionaries

Restrictions on academia were palpably loosened in the Soviet Union

after Stalin, and the Russian ethno-centrism of late Stalinism all but ended.
Notably, many of the Latin Americanists had a non-Russian family back-
ground: Sergo Mikojan and Karen Chačaturov were Russian-raised Arme-
nians, Viktor Vol’skij was Lithuanian. Jews had not been able to enrol as
students at the elitist MGIMO during late Stalinism, but a remarkable
number nonetheless found their way into area studies later. In the optimistic
atmosphere of the early Thaw, the young and ambitious meždunarodniki
began their careers as academics, journalists, diplomats or secret service
agents. They enjoyed lavish salaries, a good reputation and had the great
privilege of being able to travel abroad. Good research was done at least in
fields with a certain distance from ideology, and scholars made contact
again with the academic world outside the eastern bloc. At least within these
small circles of elites, the Soviet Union became cosmopolitan again.
Some of the meždunarodniki who went to western countries received
impressions that did not match the ideological image spread within the
Soviet Union, and this view behind the facade led some of them to
distance themselves from the Soviet system in the long run. But espe-
cially those who devoted themselves to the Third World were staunch
anti-imperialist socialist internationalists in the first place, and their
experiences abroad only confirmed this view. ‘Progressive circles in Latin
America’, Šul’govskij believed he had discovered on one of his many
trips, ‘take the USSR as an inspiration for the solution of the national
question and economic independence, which they still need to achieve
long after their political independence, . . . they see the Soviet Union as
the future of the world.’140 As for their political orientation, the director
of the Institute of Latin America in Moscow left no doubts: ‘our research
is built on the granite bedrock of Marxist-Leninist methodology . . . a
creative Marxism . . . is our internationalist obligation’.141
Some regional experts came into conflict with the Soviet state occa-
sionally. Yet dissidents, as they emerged from the late 1960s, were
usually institutniki from the natural sciences, while the bulk of meždunar-
odniki of that generation remained committed socialist internationalists.
Things looked different with a younger generation. Some developed into
stalwart anti-Soviet socialists. Others adapted to the prevailing pragma-
tism, or even cynicism, which had replaced the optimism of the Thaw
among the Soviet elites. Many who started their careers only in the 1970s
became excellent regional experts, too, but did not all develop into desk
revolutionaries. This detachment between the generations sometimes

140
Šul’govskij, ‘Opyt rešenija nacional’nogo voprosa v SSSR’, 13, 34.
141
Vol’skii, ‘Sovetskaja latinoamerikanistika’, 7, 16.

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 The meždunarodniki as banner-bearers 279

happened quite literally within families: Lev Slezkin’s son Yuri firstly was
trained as Portuguese translator, but, after some time in Mozambique in
the late 1970s, emigrated to the United States and became a historian of
the Soviet Union. Lev Zubok’s grandson Vladislav, trained at the Acad-
emy’s Institute of the USA and Canada, likewise pursued an academic
career in the United States. Yet theirs were stories of the late 1970s and
1980s, and their deviations should not be projected back on to the
generation before them.
The impact of the meždunarodniki on Soviet foreign policy is difficult
to measure. A look at experts from other fields and source material from
the – barely accessible – archive of the Russian/Soviet foreign ministry,
could give more detailed insights into the interactions of academic
experts and the inner circles of Soviet politics. The biographical assess-
ment of Soviet Latin Americanists has suggested that the meždunarodniki
did influence to some extent the Soviet stance towards the world, but not
so much through their writings, and not so much at the highest levels of
foreign policy making, either. It was through a constant interchange of
staff between different academic institutions and bodies of the Soviet
state that the Latin America experts brought their internationalist spirit
into many official organs and institutes. Some of the Latin Americanists
also made careers as scientific functionaries or reached influential pos-
itions in the administration and the Party. From these powerful positions
and through their personal contacts, some advocated a more active role
for the Soviet Union in Third World matters, if often in vain.
Soviet internationalism, this book should have made clear by now, did
not lose all relevance in the course of the 1970s. The number of Third
World students actually rose during that decade; popular culture from
Asia or Latin America was more widespread than ever before. Soviet
solidarity with Salvador Allende, more rhetorical than substantial,
proved that internationalist sentiments were still retrievable among at
least parts of the intelligentsia. And the common Soviet man or woman
was also still expected to display a degree of internationalism. ‘Whoever
did not know how the Communist Party in Chile was doing’, Boris Groys
noted, ‘and which baneful adventures US imperialism was undertaking
again, risked not getting a new flat, a pay rise or a travel permit, because
one needed a recommendation of the local party branch – which gave
that recommendation only when it sensed that the person concerned was
a genuine Soviet being, id est that he thought sufficiently philosophically,
by putting his personal needs in the context of the whole world.’142 This

142
Boris Groys, Das kommunistische Postskriptum (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006),
p. 58.

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 280 Desk revolutionaries

expectation of the state was obviously an invitation to bigotry and hollow

repetition of empty rhetoric. A Soviet joke tells of the worker at a political
meeting that was to condemn the 1973 putsch in Chile. Assiduously he
steps to the speaker’s desk and declares: ‘I don’t know who arrested
Pinochet and why, but if they don’t release Luis for the carnival, they’ll
get into trouble with us!’143 The dutiful worker-activist had picked up the
names of putschist dictator Augusto Pinochet and the arrested commun-
ist leader Luis Corvalán, but jumbled up the empty words in an attempt
to say what he was expected to say.
Occasionally, during this period of Soviet pragmatic imperialism, the
rhetoric of internationalism was also used against their own originators.
‘The šestidesjatniki’, Vajl’ and Genis wrote about the young romantic
socialist Russians of the 1960s, ‘took Cuba as a weapon against their
enemies within . . . The bureaucrats and apparatchiks were against
modern art – Fidel made abstract painting accessible to his people. They
read out boring monologues – Fidel gave rousing speeches without a
script . . . At home, Krokodil [the Soviet satirical magazine] made fun of
long-haired and bearded men, and Komsomol brigades harassed them –
here even the head of state himself wore a beard.’144 Their critical idealism
however, and with it their use of internationalist language, had faded out
by the end of their decade. Small illegal groups of radical leftists occasion-
ally used the names and theories of Latin American revolutionary heroes,
as did the Moscow Otrjad Če Gevary (Che Guevara Squad) in the late
1970s.145 But most other examples of this creative adaptation were less
romanticising and were found not so much in Russia proper as on the
peripheries of the communist empire: Armenian nationalists used the
concept of people’s friendship in an attempt to gain support from Moscow
for their own interests against Azerbaijan and Turkey.146 Some east Euro-
peans identified with anti-imperialist national independence movements
in the global South – because they felt like colonial subjects of the Soviet
Union. Whenever the Polish travel writer Ryszard Kapuściński indicted
Third World despots in his hugely popular books, readers back home read
them as clever criticism of their own authoritarian rulers.147 And the East
German singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann contrasted the selfless socialist

143
A. Golubev (ed.), Istorija SSSR v anekdotach (Smolensk: Smjadyn’, 1991), p. 139.
144
Vajl’ and Genis, 60-e, pp. 52–64.
145
A. Tarasov, G. Čerkasov and T. Šavšukova, Levye v Rossii: ot umerennych do ekstremistov
(Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Institut Eksperimental’noj Sociologii, 1997), p. 15.
146
Maike Lehmann, Eine sowjetische Nation: Nationale Sozialismusinterpretationen in
Armenien seit 1945 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2012), pp. 250–93.
147
Ryszard Kapuściński, The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat (London: Penguin Books,
2006).

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 The meždunarodniki as banner-bearers 281

Che Guevara (Jesus mit der Knarre, Jesus with the gun) with the over-
indulged communist bureaucrats in the GDR.
In the late Soviet Union, internationalist rhetoric was not so much
used to criticise the communist system but, to the contrary, in order to
thwart a more pragmatic type of foreign policy. The endurance of ever-
ageing Soviet foreign policy makers exacerbated a frustration among
more idealist socialists: Foreign Minister Gromyko was in office from
1957 to 1986; Ponomarev headed the International Department of the
Central Committee from 1955 to 1986 – to be followed by Anatolij
Dobrynin, who had been ambassador to the United States continuously
since 1962. When, in 1978, García Márquez’s Otoño del patriarco (The
Autumn of the Patriarch) appeared in the USSR, many Soviet readers
immediately drew parallels with their own leaders.148 The old guard of
Soviet apparatchiks and the Latin American ‘gorillas’, with their fantasy
uniforms, jingling from an armada of medals, with their senile stubborn-
ness and their caricatured sclerotic appearance, had a lot more in common
than either would have admitted.149 In the course of the early 1980s,
both disappeared from the political stage.
The energetic reformer Mikhail Gorbachev, from the same generation
as the first meždunarodniki, shared their socialist internationalist values.
In his first years in office, he expanded Soviet activities in the Third
World and, scaling up the economic support for the Sandinistas by
40 per cent, declared to the West: ‘never will we leave Nicaragua at the
mercy of the imperialists’.150 The internationalist academics thus whole-
heartedly supported perestroika. Majdanik popularised the Soviet reform
programme in the Spanish-speaking world with his 1988 book Revolución
de las esperanzas (Revolution of Hopes).151 These hopes were not ful-
filled. The ambitious economic reform programme failed miserably,
living standards sank rapidly and Soviet internationalism came under
fierce attack from all sides as a waste of Russian money.
On Soviet television, the parodist Aleksandr Ivanov, rather humour-
lessly, complained: ‘and we frittered away our money on Sandinista
Nicaragua for ten years, on those dilettantes with the same useless
ideology as ours’.152 Intellectuals and poets, including those who had

148
Kutejščikova, Moskva-Meksiko-Moskva, p. 326.
149
Volpi, El insomnio de Bolívar, p. 58.
150
Westad, The Global Cold War, p. 370; Michail Gorbatschow, Perestroika: Die zweite
Russische Revolution (Munich: Droemer Knaur, 1987), pp. 221–46.
151
Marta Harnecker (ed.), Perestroika: la revolución de las esperanzas. Entrevista a Kiva
Maidanik (Buenos Aires: Dialéctica, 1988).
152
Aleksandr Snitko, ‘Skol’ko stoit naša sovest’ v Latinskoj Amerike? Zametki ešče bolee
neravnodušnye’, Latinskaja Amerika 4 (1991), 39.

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 282 Desk revolutionaries

praised the Sandinistas in their works only few years before, now publicly
jumped on the bandwagon. The Latin Americanist Michail Beljat
demanded in Literaturnaja Gazeta: ‘Give me back my credit, Coman-
dante Fidel!’ Even Yevgeny Yevtushenko spoke in the same vein as a
delegate to the Supreme Soviet.153 By the end of the 1980s, the popular
tune ‘Kuba – ljubov’ moja’ was heard with new bitter and hateful lyrics:
Kuba, otdaj naš chleb!
Kuba, voz’mi svoj sachar!
Nam nadoel tvoj kosmatij Fidel‘.
Kuba, idi ty na cher!154
In concession to both these popular sentiments and to the economic
chaos in the USSR, Gorbachev cut Soviet support for Latin American
communist parties as well as leftist movements and governments in the
late 1980s. Diplomatic relations and interactions were expanded at the
same time; several high-ranking non-socialist Latin American statesmen
made official state visits to the USSR. Gorbachev himself scheduled a
trip to Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay in 1987, but in the end – in
accommodation to the United States – sent his foreign minister Eduard
Shevardnadze, and he himself went only to Cuba in 1989.
This meant that, as long as the Soviet Union existed, no Soviet head of
state, government or Party ever visited mainland Central or South Amer-
ica. At the level of high politics, they had always remained low priority for
the Kremlin, and were mostly of interest as antipode to the United
States. Economically, the entire subcontinent was hardly ever relevant
for the USSR throughout its existence – with the notable exception of the
import of grain from Argentina, which did not join a western embargo in
the wake of the invasion of Afghanistan; as return service, the Soviets
declared Argentina’s aggression against the Falkland Islands to be an act
of anti-imperialism. Other than that, the Soviet market proved incompat-
ible with the raw-material-exporting Latin American states, and Soviet
commodities were usually not competitive on the open market. Soviet
trade with the area did not even match the humble exchange with Africa.
For Soviet socialists by conviction, however, Latin America was a haven
of a romanticised socialist revolution, just as it was for the western New
Left at the same time. The Soviet desk revolutionaries from the area
studies made sure that communist parties and leftist movements
constantly received large sums of money directly from the Moscow Party

153
Ibid.
154
‘Cuba, give back our bread; Cuba, keep your sugar; we are fed up with your shaggy
Fidel; Cuba, go fuck yourself!’: Vajl’ and Genis, 60-e, p. 59.

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 The meždunarodniki as banner-bearers 283

apparatus. With the end of the Soviet Union, all these parties – except the
Cuban one – sank into obscurity.
Most Soviet citizens, by that time, had very different sorrows than the
fate of global socialism. Aleksandr Snitko, the Belorussian meždunarod-
nik, indignantly reported a view he encountered in conversations with
many ordinary Russians at that time: ‘whenever I argue in support of the
anti-fascist movement in Chile, I hear the answer: “Pinochet – that is
good! We need our own Pinochet, to put the country in order. Under
Stalin, there was order” . . . I speak of the foreign debt, the lack of food,
the infant mortality, the political repression in many Latin American
countries, and the answer is: “enough of feeding these wogs. They are
ungrateful cattle. Remember Indonesia – we fed them, fed them; Egypt,
we fed them, fed them, and then they all showed us their arses”. . . All of
my opponents had the same solid conviction: the lack of sausage at our
shop counters is to blame on the Cubans, the Vietnamese, the Ethiopians
and all the other scum from the Third World.’155
Sorely shocked at this widespread attitude, Snitko nostalgically
summed up what Soviet internationalism had meant for him: ‘Now and
in the near future, nothing distinguishes the Soviet Union from the Third
World. But our help for its anti-colonial, anti-imperialist struggle might
remain the brightest side of our gloomy history.’ The most ardent pro-
ponents of Soviet internationalism after Stalin, those who saw it as more
than an instrument of Soviet geo-politics, were also those who supported
Gorbachev’s reforms longer than anyone else – and were deeply disap-
pointed to see the Soviet Union, their motherland of socialism, fall apart
as a consequence.156

155
Snitko, ‘Skol’ko stoit naša sovest’ v Latinskoj Amerike?’, 38–9. 156
Ibid., 42.

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