The sui generis impact of the Russian Revolution in Latin America

The impact of the Bolshevik Revolution was highly inspiring on the many existing Latin America socialist and radical political parties. Not only their leaders took the long and hazardous journey to Russia to see with their own eyes their dream of a socialist ‘republic of workers, peasants and soldiers’, and in 13 years they established 15 communist parties that joined the Comintern. The received wisdom within traditional Marxist thought was that unless capitalism developed the productive forces fully, the objective conditions for a socialist revolution would not exist. Therefore, the national bourgeoisie would not only lead the ‘first’ stage of the revolution, but would play a progressive perhaps even a revolutionary role in carrying through the national democratic tasks. The Russian Socialist Revolution demolished that rigid dogma to the approval of many Latin American revolutionary leaders such as Mella in Cuba, Recabarren in Chile and especially Mariátegui in Peru, who independently have come pretty much the same conclusion. But, although the Russian Revolution vindicated their views, the Comintern’s immense influence was used to guide them against applying in Latin America’s backward capitalist societies what the Bolsheviks had done in backward Russia of 1917, namely, resolve the national-democratic tasks through a proletariat-led socialist revolution.