The Latin American Communist Movement: Realities and Relations with the Soviet Union

Soviet behavior toward the external world has always been conditioned by two factors; one pragmatic, the other ideological. The Soviet viewpoint is contradictory. It portrays links with the Communist movement as fulfilling a very important ideological role in providing internal and external legitimacy to the Soviet state. The expansion of the world Communist movement came as a consequence of the triumph of the Russian Revolution and of the Soviet Union’s isolation from the rest of the world. After 1921, the Comintern had abandoned its radicalism and begun to insist on the need for a “bourgeois-democratic” phase in all underdeveloped countries. During the Sixth Congress of the Comintern, in which a new radical line was to be approved, the presence of Latin America within the international Communist movement was acknowledged.