ABSTRACT
This article discusses reactions to the October Revolution and birth of the Soviet state between 1917 and 1922 in Brazil and Argentina, and how different segments of the local press and intelligentsia developed their own narratives surrounding this dramatic upheaval in a far-off land. It looks at various articles in newspapers and journals as well as select publications from the period, and identifies how conservatives, trade unionists, anarchists and socialists interpreted very different meanings from the scattered information they could obtain about events in Russia. It also includes the mixed reaction found in Argentina’s Russian-language press, whose primarily Russian Jewish readership found themselves scapegoated and victimized during this period by the anti-communist paramilitary Argentine Patriotic League. Despite widespread support from the Argentine and Brazilian left for the Russian revolutionaries in the first years after October, by 1921 the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion, critical reports from non-Bolshevik eyewitnesses and the Communist International’s declaration that all member parties must submit to control from Moscow had decimated this consensus, dividing ongoing supporters of the regime, including the newly formed Communist Party of Argentina, from its new critics.
