The Cold War and Latin American Area Studies in the Former USSR: Reflections and Reminiscences

Historically, area studies as an academic field developed in response to the needs of foreign policy planners and geopolitical strategists in the leading nation-states of the twentieth century. It was essentially a utilitarian field of study as opposed to more traditional disciplines devoted in the main to knowledge for its own sake or what the political economist Thorstein Veblen sardonically referred to as “idle curiosity.” Predictably, there have been undercurrents of tension between scholars of those traditional disciplines and colleagues who have applied their academic specializations to the interdisciplinary purposes of area studies programs. This was quite apparent in the case of U.S. Latin Americanists, primarily in the relationship between the long-established Conference on Latin American History (CLAH, founded in 1926) of the American Historical Association and the Cold War–era Latin American Studies Association (LASA, organized in 1966). Similar professional tensions existed among Soviet Latin Americanists as well—some affiliated with the Moscow-based Institute of Latin America (ILA) of the USSR Academy of Sciences and others with the Academy’s more traditional discipline-focused institutes, notably those of world history and ethnography.

Given the global Cold War ideological confrontation between the two superpowers, it was only natural that the U.S. and Soviet academic establishments should scrutinize what their respective area studies programs were doing and who in each case was contributing what. Because of a sequence of life opportunities that endowed me with a knowledge of Spanish and Russian, combined with on-the-ground experience in both regions of the world and the requisite academic credentials, I had fortuitous occasion to gain inside familiarity with Soviet Latin American studies and with numerous Soviet Latin America specialists, as well as to facilitate professional contacts between them and their U.S. counterparts and to observe the ideological agendas that befogged their appraisals of one another.

I came to this experience through the prism of several years’ advanced graduate study at Stanford University (1962–1969), one of the United States’ premier institutions of Cold War indoctrination and training for service in the U.S. global offensive against the Soviet anticapitalist challenge. My initial two years at Stanford were spent pursuing a Master’s degree in that institution’s unique Institute of Hispanic American and Luso-Brazilian Studies (HALBS), one of academia’s earliest Latin American area studies programs (created in 1944) and, notably, one that did not conform to the prevailing Cold War criteria of U.S. higher education in the post–World War II decades.

The reason it did not conform was the intellectual independence of its director, Ronald Hilton, a British scholar who had witnessed the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), had been appalled by public ignorance of the causes and underlying issues of that horrific conflict, and, as a professor of Romance languages at Stanford some years later, was determined to create an interdisciplinary course of study that would give students a sound understanding of societal affairs throughout the Hispanic world (Latin America, the Iberian Peninsula, and the overseas territories of Spain and Portugal). The institute’s only ideological guideline was Hilton’s posted admonition: “I don’t care what you think. What I won’t tolerate is that you do not think.”

And indeed, the 20 or 30 students enrolled in any given quarter, together with the program’s advanced-degree candidates, spanned the gamut of ideological viewpoints yet collaborated effectively to produce the institute’s monthly Hispanic American Report (HAR), a 96-page review of current events in 22 Latin American countries (including Puerto Rico), Spain and Portugal, and the Netherlands Antilles, Surinam, the West Indies, British Guiana, and British Honduras. Each issue of the HAR also included an international affairs section and an introductory commentary by the director. Published continuously since 1948, the HAR had no precedent in the academic world and was read assiduously by a wide range of subscribers involved in Latin America, including the Central Intelligence Agency, to which we would send a dozen copies each month.

The Cold War–related institutional crisis that would ultimately end the HALBS program was its deviation from Stanford’s ideological role as a leading university, complicated by the fact that the influential HAR monthly appeared as a Stanford University publication with the university’s name placed prominently beneath the journal’s name on the cover. While appearing to sponsor the HAR, Stanford in fact exerted no editorial control over its content, and this became a thorny issue with regard to Hilton’s monthly commentary on Latin American matters of concern to U.S. foreign policy officials. An especially troubling instance was his revelation months before the event of preparations in Guatemala for the April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by an armed force of CIA-trained Cuban exiles. Eventually, in the fall of 1964 Stanford administrators managed to bring about Hilton’s resignation as director of the HALBS program, ceased publication of the HAR, and fashioned a new social-science-focused program of Latin American studies more consonant with U.S. Cold War priorities (Bartley, 2001: 596–598).

As these events unfolded, the Soviets were developing their own academic program of Latin American area studies. While the USSR lacked an established tradition of scholarship in this field comparable to that of the United States, there is in fact an interesting record of Russian writings about Spanish and Portuguese America dating back to the eighteenth century (Bartley, 1978a; 1978b). Four of the earliest Soviet scholarly works worthy of note are Vladimir Miroshevskii’s (1946) posthumously published history of Spanish American independence movements, the posthumous publication of ethnographer G. G. Manizer’s (1948) account of the multiyear early-nineteenth-century Langsdorf natural history expedition to Brazil, the economic geographer A. A. Dolinin’s (1952) geography of Chile, and L. Yu. Sliozkin’s (1956) history of the Spanish-American War. The Soviets also translated and published a number of Latin America–related works by U.S. writers, notable among them Preston James’s (1949) standard geography of the region, Alfred B. Thomas’s (1960) Latin America: A History, and Henry Bamford Parks’s (1949) History of Mexico, and by the early 1960s they were beginning to publish serious outline country histories of their own (Al’perovich and Lavrov, 1960; Ermolaev, Lavrov, and Shtrakhov, 1961; Ermolaev, Sliozkin, and Al’perovich, 1962). Meanwhile, interdisciplinary study of the region had developed to the point where it was decided to create a specialized academic institution to support and promote it.

That occurred in 1961, when the Soviet Academy of Sciences established ILA as “the main scholarly research and coordinating center for Latin American studies in the USSR.” ILA’s primary purpose was “the integrated study of the countries of Latin America,” focusing on “integrated country studies, economic and sociopolitical problems, the labor movement, the foreign policy and international relations of the Latin American countries, the building of socialism in Cuba, the ideology, science, and culture of the peoples of Latin America, and the economic, political, and cultural relations of the Latin American countries with the USSR” (Vol’skii, 1979: 521; 1982: 131). It maintained relations with a wide range of foreign scientific centers (especially in Latin America), universities, and international organizations (e.g., the Economic Commission of Latin America, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the Organization of American States), and in 1969 began publishing Latinskaia Amerika, a monthly journal edited by Sergo Anastasovich Mikoyan, son of the longtime Politburo member Anastas Mikoyan. From 1974 until the demise of the USSR, ILA also published a Spanish-language edition of the journal, América Latina.

By 1970 the USSR had over 200 academic Latin Americanists, 219 of whom were listed in an ILA-published directory (ILA, 1971). Starting in the early 1960s, ILA joined other Academy of Sciences institutes in the publication of basic country studies and other introductory works of value to any Soviet citizen wishing to learn about Latin America. Four representative volumes are an economic, historical, and cultural overview of Latin America (Vol’skii et al., 1960), an account of the first five years of the Cuban Revolution (Efimov et al., 1963), an overview of the origins and development of the Latin American nations (Efimov et al., 1964), and a collection of 11 historical essays on Latin America’s war of independence (Lavrov et al., 1964).

One of ILA’s most notable achievements was the publication in 1979 and 1982 of an impressive two-volume encyclopedic reference work on Latin America (Vol’skii, 1979, 1982) with an initial edition of 50,000 copies. No such work had been produced in the United States or Europe (or has been since, that I am aware of), and I have often had occasion to consult it over the course of my own academic career as a Latin Americanist. When I learned about it in February 1968 while pursuing dissertation research in Moscow, the project’s senior editor, Viktor Vol’skii, proposed that I prepare political profiles of the principal U.S. Latin Americanists for inclusion in the encyclopedia. Instantly alert to where that proposal seemed to lead, I politely declined, citing the terms of the fellowship that supported my stay in the USSR, which explicitly prohibited any commitments other than my dissertation research. Vol’skii replied, suggestively, that that really presented no problem, since “no one would have to know about my work for the encyclopedia.” I insisted that I could not violate the terms of my fellowship, and nothing further was said about it. When years later I acquired my own copy of that weighty publication, I was interested to note that it contained no entries on U.S. Latin Americanists or the field of Latin American area studies in the United States generally.

I first met Vol’skii in the fall of 1966 while pursuing my Ph.D. in history at Stanford. He had become director of ILA the year before when his predecessor, S. S. Mikhailov, was named Soviet ambassador to Brazil, and now, invited by CLAH, was visiting Latin American studies programs in the United States. At the time, I was planning to travel to the USSR the following year for dissertation research, so when Vol’skii came to Stanford to meet with Latin Americanist faculty the History Department assigned me to be his guide and chauffeur. During the three days I spent with him while he was at Stanford, we got to know each other better than typically happens in such professional encounters. As a result he received me warmly in Moscow, and we would interact repeatedly thereafter over the next 20 years, albeit with occasional suspicions about our respective agendas.

At roughly the same time Vol’skii was proposing to involve me in a targeted research project suggestive of an intelligence approach, my spouse and I were invited to U.S. Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson’s residence for lunch. The reason was my friendship with the ambassador’s nephew David F. Thompson, whom I knew from Stanford’s HALBS program and who at the time was a CIA analyst in Langley, Virginia. David had asked me to pass on his greetings to his uncle in Moscow, which I did, resulting in the luncheon invitation a few days later. On the appointed day Ambassador Thompson’s official car pulled up in front of our hotel displaying the U.S. flag on each of the front fenders, the ambassador himself got out to greet us, and we all got in and drove away. After lunch he returned to the embassy and had his chauffeur drive us back to our hotel, now without the flags on the fenders. As my wife and I entered the hotel, one of the doormen asked us sotto voce, “Vsio v poriadke, da?” (Everything in order?).

Obviously, our encounter with Ambassador Thompson had not gone unnoticed, and Vol’skii subsequently received a full report. When next I returned to Moscow four years later to pursue additional research toward revising my Ph.D. dissertation for publication, my time there coincided with Richard Nixon’s May 1972 visit, and when I went to see Vol’skii at ILA his very first question was “When are you going to see the president?” To my dismissal of his question as fatuous, he replied with a grin, “But last time you saw the American ambassador.” The problem, I could see, was that that kind of a meeting would never happen in the case of a Soviet academic unless something deeper was involved. Despite my insistence that my only reason for being in the USSR was scholarly research on Latin America and that I had not the slightest wish to meet Richard Nixon, Vol’skii could not help but read something more into my earlier meeting with the ambassador.

It did not lessen Vol’skii’s suspicions when my return the following April coincided with an official two-day visit to Leningrad by Mexican President Luis Echeverría Álvarez, which I also witnessed—and doubtless would have reassured him even less had he known that I had met a member of Echeverría’s entourage on the train back to Moscow and that, “over Armenian cognac, we talked into the early hours of the morning about Mexican-Soviet relations and the significance of the presidential visit.” It was interesting to compare the Echeverría visit with Nixon’s the previous May, I noted in my posttrip report to the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), the organization that had financially supported me on that occasion. “While Echeverría received almost as much fanfare [as Nixon],” I wrote, “including a television address to the Soviet public, security measures were much less evident” (memorandum to Dr. Allen H. Kassof, Executive Director, International Research and Exchanges Board, Subject: “Meetings with Latin American specialists in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and the German Democratic Republic, 9 April–6 May 1973,” R. H. Bartley papers, 1966–1996).

Serious interest in Soviet Latin American studies on the part of U.S. academics was first shown by established Latin Americanist historians, most notably Howard F. Cline (Hispanic Foundation of the U.S. Library of Congress) and Lewis Hanke (University of Massachusetts, Amherst). In his capacity as director of the Hispanic Foundation, Cline had been instrumental in the publication of a two-volume bibliography of Soviet writings on Latin America (Okinshevich, 1966) and, subsequently, as chairman of CLAH’s Committee on Activities and Projects, had promoted publication of a collection of 47 articles by Soviet Latin Americanists in English translation (Oswald, 1970). It was Cline who on behalf of CLAH had extended the invitation for Vol’skii’s fall 1966 visit to the United States, and Vol’skii had reciprocated with an ILA invitation to Cline for a two-week visit to the USSR, which he made in the summer of 1968.

I had discussed Cline’s visit at length with Vol’skii and ILA’s international relations secretary, Aleksei Maevskii, during my winter 1968 stay in Moscow and corresponded with Cline about various details of his pending trip. At the time, I was abroad on a Ford Foundation Foreign Area Fellowship conducting research for what eventually would be published as my Imperial Russia and the Struggle for Latin American Independence (Bartley, 1978a) and later that year would travel to Rio de Janeiro to examine relevant manuscript holdings in the Brazilian Foreign Ministry’s Palácio do Itamaraty archives. In anticipation of my Rio visit, Vol’skii requested that I be granted an audience there with Ambassador Mikhailov and then notified me that the audience had been authorized. Mikhailov, as the first director of ILA, had been the first authority to lay out the scope and objectives of Soviet Latin American studies (Mikhailov, 1962; Oswald, 1970: 4–9), and it seemed appropriate that I take the opportunity to meet him. I corresponded with Cline about it and the possibility of perhaps gaining some helpful guidance for his own upcoming trip to the USSR and Eastern Europe. He agreed that such a meeting could prove useful and that I should pursue it. In the end, however, ostensibly because of scheduling conflicts, the meeting did not take place.

Lewis Hanke joined Cline in the effort to open scholarly contacts and dialogue with Soviet and East European Latin Americanists after reading two items on the subject that I published in 1970, one a critical introduction to and translated review of Soviet historiography of Latin America by M. S. Al’perovich (Al’perovich, 1970; Bartley, 1970b) and the other a review of Soviet scholarship on Brazilian history (Bartley, 1970a). He was motivated by an abiding belief in the need for historians everywhere but most immediately in the United States to broaden their perspectives by interacting across international borders and ideology (Hanke, 1974):

International congresses of historians [a reference to the International Congress of Historical Sciences, scheduled to meet in San Francisco in August 1975] do not fully meet the needs of the times and cannot be expected to do so unless the organization that sponsors them is substantially changed and unless national organizations accept far greater international responsibilities. For the AHA [American Historical Association] this means that we need to strengthen the teaching and writing in the United States of the history of all regions of the world, to recognize the increasingly significant study abroad of our history, and to foster in all possible ways the professional relations of historians on an international scale.

In the three-plus years prior to his presidential address to the AHA Hanke had done more than any other scholar to implement those professional relations with Soviet counterparts in the field of Latin American area studies. In January 1971 he had spent 10 days in Leningrad and Moscow meeting with Soviet colleagues and exploring possible avenues of scholarly exchange and collaborative work, including a proposed volume of translated Soviet historical scholarship on Latin America that eventually materialized as the Soviet Historians on Latin America volume that I subsequently edited for CLAH (Bartley, 1978b).

During this visit Hanke made an impressive and largely successful effort to familiarize himself with the nature, quality, and scope of Soviet Latin America–related scholarship, meeting, sometimes several times, with key people of varying institutional affiliations: Moisei Samuilovich Al’perovich (Institute of World History), Nikolai Matveevich Lavrov (head, History of the Latin American Countries Department, Institute of World History), Iosif Romual’dovich Grigulevich (head, Foreign Ethnography Department, Miklukho-Maklai Ethnographic Institute), Lev Yur’evich Sliozkin (Institute of World History), Anatolii Fedorovich Shul’govskii (head, Labor and National Liberation Movements Department, ILA), Sergo Anastasovich Mikoyan (editor, Latinskaia Amerika, ILA), Boris Nikolaevich Komissarov (History Faculty, Leningrad State University), Elida Eduardovna Litavrina (History Faculty, Moscow State University), Adelaida Mikhailovna Zorina (Institute of World History), and Leonid Avelevich Shur (Ethnographic Institute). Hanke was unable to meet with Vol’skii, who was on vacation, but did meet twice with ILA’s international relations secretary, A. D. Maevskii, who gave him a dozen or so ILA books and a set of Latinskaia Amerika (Lewis Hanke, “Notes on conversations in Leningrad and Moscow with Soviet historians interested in Latin America, January 15–26, 1971.” R. H. Bartley papers, 1966–1996). Indeed, he was received warmly and treated well by the Soviet academic establishment and came away from that experience cautiously optimistic that mutually beneficial exchanges and scholarly collaboration were feasible despite the Cold War context in which they would inescapably occur, as in fact proved to be the case. The 10 Latin Americanists with whom he conversed at greatest length offer a perfect window into the human mix and institutional framework of Latin American area studies in the USSR, starting with Al’perovich and Grigulevich.

Al’perovich was a true scholar, the “dean” of Soviet Latin Americanist historians as Hanke referred to him. (In an obituary written for the Hispanic American Historical Review, professor emeritus of Latin American history Benjamin Keen describes Hanke himself as “the dean of North American Latin Americanists” [Keen, 1993], which appropriately captures a sense of the way he and Al’perovich related in their lengthy conversations and subsequent correspondence.) He was a Marxist in his conception of how history unfolds, but, as he observed, U.S. historians likewise interpret the past from an ideological perspective, which no less than in the case of Marxist scholars determines the topics they choose to investigate but not the quality of their scholarship. “Disagreement with the world view or general historical conception of one or another of our foreign critics by no means prevents us from recognizing the correctness of [his or her] views on given problems provided that the viewpoint in question is convincingly argued and scientifically demonstrated” (Al’perovich, 1970: 64).

Grigulevich, who was present for Hanke’s key Moscow meetings with Soviet Latin Americanist historians and, as did Al’perovich, arranged to meet privately with him for further extended conversations, represented a very different aspect of Soviet academic life. Unknown to Hanke—or to me then, although I would subsequently learn details of the story from Al’perovich and Leonid Shur—were Grigulevich’s legendary exploits as a Stalinist covert intelligence agent in Latin America and Europe. He had been a Comintern operative in Argentina in the mid-1930s; was apparently involved in the assassination of the Catalan anarchist leader Andrés Nín in 1937, organized and led the failed 1940 assassination attempt against Leon Trotsky in Mexico, and spent World War II conducting sabotage operations against Nazi shipping and warehouse facilities on the River Plate. As part of the covert network he created for the Trotsky operation, he established a safe house in Santa Fe, New Mexico, that subsequently served as a transfer point for atomic bomb secrets passing from Los Alamos to Mexico en route to the USSR (Andrew and Mitrokhin, 1999; Patenaude, 2009; Sudoplatov and Sudoplatov, 1994).

Following the war, under the name Teodoro Castro, Grigulevich involved himself in the domestic political struggles of Costa Rica, was sufficiently facile linguistically to pass himself off as Costa Rican, and even managed to befriend José “Pepe” Figueres, who as president appointed him Costa Rican envoy to Italy ¹ and Yugoslavia. When Stalin, shortly before his death in March 1953, ordered the assassination of the Yugoslav head of state, Marshal Josip Broz Tito, Grigulevich, with diplomatic access to Tito’s inner circle, was tasked with carrying it out. Upon Stalin’s sudden death of a stroke, however, the mission was aborted and Grigulevich recalled to Moscow out of concern that his identity as a Soviet agent might be revealed by the prewar NKVD defector Aleksandr Orlov, who had begun publishing his reminiscences in Life magazine. It was not, but Grigulevich decided at that point in his life to pursue an academic career as a Latin America specialist (Andrew and Mitrokhin, 1999: 357–358; Sudoplatov and Sudoplatov, 1994: 335–339).

He earned a doctorate in history from the Higher Party School attached to the Central Committee of the CPSU, served as head of the Foreign Ethnography Department of the Miklukho-Maklai Ethnographic Institute, was editor in chief of the academic journal Obshchestvennye nauki i sovremennost’ (Social Sciences and the Present), directed the then newly established review Razas y Pueblos, and oversaw the Latin American section of the Academy of Sciences publication Problemy novoi i noveishei istorii (Problems of Modern and Recent History). Grigulevich impressed Hanke as “quite ebullient” and “not as learned” as Al’perovich, who struck him as “the quiet brain at work” (Lewis Hanke, “Notes on conversations in Leningrad and Moscow with Soviet historians interested in Latin America, January 15–26, 1971,” R. H. Bartley papers, 1966–1996). Given Grigulevich’s worldly intelligence background and suspected continuing ties to the KGB, as well as his Higher Party School academic training, one might assume that his scholarship was less than distinguished. Yet such an appraisal, in my estimation, is erroneous, for in many ways he surpassed the traditional attributes of scholarly excellence.

No one in the Soviet academic world, I would venture, knew Latin America more intimately than Grigulevich, and that visceral, firsthand knowledge carried over in insightful ways to both his popular and his scholarly writing. Interestingly, he distinguished between the two genres by writing his popular books under the pen name I. R. Lavretskii, reserving Grigulevich for his more serious scholarly works. Although he wrote on a broad range of topics, especially in popular formats, his primary interest was the role of religion in the history of Latin America. Two profusely documented books on that role establish him as a genuinely accomplished scholar: The “Insurgent” Church in Latin America (Grigulevich, 1972) and The Cross and the Sword (Grigulevich, 1977).

Lavrov, the director of the Institute of World History’s Latin American Countries Department, was also a serious scholar and the only Soviet historian to conduct significant archival research in Latin America outside of Cuba. For his seminal book on the Mexican Revolution (Lavrov et al., 1972) he worked in the manuscript department of Mexico’s National Library, the Archivo General de la Nación, the Archivo General de la Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, and the Archivo Histórico del Instituto de Antropología e Historia, all in Mexico City. While Cold War ideological issues may in some cases have been a factor, the overriding obstacle to Soviet scholars’ pursuing field research in Latin America was the unavailability of hard currency, which also complicated the exchange of U.S. and Soviet Latin Americanists, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, when Soviet authorities were reluctant to release hard currency for international travel. In Lavrov’s case, long-standing Soviet interest in the comparative history of the Mexican and Russian revolutions may have been a deciding factor in authorizing his archival research in Mexico.

Lavrov’s position as director of his institute’s Latin American Countries Department also opened a familiar window on institutional politics in the academic world. Hanke was surprised to learn during his January 1971 visit to Moscow that Al’perovich and Lev Sliozkin were administratively located in the institute’s U.S. History Department despite the fact that they were “two of the best and most productive writers on Latin American history” in the USSR. They disagreed strongly with the way Lavrov ran his department, Al’perovich and Sliozkin explained, and so were separated administratively from Lavrov’s institutional authority. “This device is not unknown in U.S. university circles,” Hanke observed ( Lewis Hanke, “Notes on conversations in Leningrad and Moscow with Soviet historians interested in Latin America, January 15–26, 1971,” R. H. Bartley papers, 1966–1996). I would note, too, that Al’perovich and another colleague, Boris Timofeyevich Rudenko, had written the first extensively documented Soviet monograph on the Mexican Revolution 14 years before Lavrov’s volume appeared (Al’perovich and Rudenko, 1958) and that there may have been personal tensions between the two arising from the fact that Lavrov was selected to do archival research in Mexico when professionally Al’perovich might have been the better choice. This sort of personal conflict, of course, is common in the U.S. academy as well.

Al’perovich and Sliozkin, for their part, were close friends, which no doubt explains why Sliozkin also found himself administratively placed in the institute’s Department of U.S. History. Notably, both men held the Soviet academic title of senior scholar (starshii nauchnyi sotrudnik), which Lavrov did not, possibly indicating bureaucratic recognition of their professional equality with Lavrov despite their having been removed from his department (ILA, 1971: 3,56, 87). As noted by Hanke, Sliozkin was a genuine scholar on a professional par with Al’perovich. He had written a major work (Sliozkin, 1964) on tsarist Russia’s response to the independence movements in colonial Latin America (my dissertation topic [Bartley, 1971]), a copy of which he inscribed for me in true scholarly spirit during my first visit to Moscow in 1968: “To Russell Bartley—a colleague and, I hope, encouraging critic.” Sliozkin and Al’perovich had previously coauthored a widely used university-level textbook on Latin American history from the eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries (Al’perovich and Sliozkin, 1970) and would subsequently publish a significantly expanded version from pre-Columbian times down to the twentieth century (Al’perovich and Sliozkin, 1981). The former book was issued in an edition of 16,000 copies, the latter in an edition of 30,000.

Others in the representative group of academics with whom Lewis Hanke met fill out the human and intellectual panorama of Soviet Latin American area studies during the Cold War. All possessed at minimum the academic degree of kandidat, which was the equivalent of a U.S. Ph.D. and signified that the holder was a candidate for the highest Russian degree, a doctorate of sciences, typically earned at mid-career. Shul’govskii was a doctor of historical sciences in charge of ILA’s Department of Labor and National Liberation Movements. He was well read in the social sciences and modern Latin American history (Shul’govskii, 1974; 1978), had a quick mind ever ready to challenge unfounded assumptions, and was generally representative of ILA’s senior staff.

Litavrina held the kandidat degree and was a senior instructor in Moscow State University’s faculty of modern and recent history. Her fields of specialization were the history of Spain and colonial Spanish America and contemporary socioeconomic problems in the Andean countries. She had numerous scholarly publications to her credit (see, e.g., Litavrina, 1966; 1978) and was one of the Soviet Latin Americanists who would visit Latin American area studies programs in the United States under CLAH auspices. She is also an example of the pressure some Soviet academics experienced to favor recent or contemporary research topics over personally preferred aspects of the more distant past.

Mikoyan was in a category all by himself, first because of his pedigree in the Soviet political hierarchy and second because of his own independent intellect, which led him to take on the editorship of ILA’s Latinskaia Amerika rather than a prominent post in the foreign affairs establishment or some other privileged niche in the government bureaucracy. As he recounts in a volume on Stalinism published in the United Kingdom after the collapse of the USSR (Mikoyan, 1993):

Stalinism in its worst features was for me not an object of academic study from abroad, but my natural environment for at least the first twenty-four years of my life. I lived not just in the heartland of Stalinism, but in the family of one of Stalin’s closest associates. I lived inside the Kremlin walls, walls which isolated ‘The Great Genius of All Times and Peoples’ from some two hundred million people living outside (but unfortunately not the other way around). I could see a short man in the uniform of a Marshal, followed or surrounded by a group of people including my own father who practically every night (or rather early morning) came back straight from His home.

Mikoyan earned a doctorate in historical sciences, proved to be an excellent editor, was more cosmopolitan than many of his contemporaries, and did much to stimulate the qualitative development of Latin American studies in the former USSR. I was fortunate to have several serious conversations with him over the years that gave me clearer insight into ILA and a number of its Latin America specialists, as well as into the Soviet academic world more generally, but above all into him personally. The last time we met was one evening in March 1994 at his apartment in Arlington, Virginia, where he was residing while a visiting scholar at the University of Maryland’s Center for International Development and Conflict Management. In the course of that evening’s conversation, he shared additional insights into several of his Latin Americanist colleagues.

He and Vol’skii had studied together at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (attached to the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs) and had been on friendly terms for many years. As director of ILA, however, Vol’skii gradually became possessed of his own self-importance and clashed with Mikoyan over the latter’s readiness to publish material in the journal that differed from his own officialist views. The final 10 years of Vol’skii’s ILA directorship, Mikoyan felt, actually hurt the institute because he increasingly subordinated institutional interests to his pursuit of administrative perks, especially foreign travel. After the collapse of the USSR, Vol’skii was replaced as ILA director by Boris Iosifovich Koval’, a disciplined Latin Americanist scholar who had never thought well of him (R. H. Bartley papers, 1966–1996, Sergo Mikoyan file).

Mikoyan was also on cordial terms with Grigulevich, who devoted time to proofreading each issue of Latinskaia Amerika and “was almost Jesuitical” in his attention to detail. Mikoyan confirmed that Grigulevich had been a Bolshevik agent since the early 1930s and that he had been involved in the plot to assassinate Trotsky but had been unaware of his involvement in the Nín assassination, although he acknowledged that it was possible. He also confirmed that Grigulevich had served as a Costa Rican diplomat accredited to the Vatican but was unfamiliar with the latest revelations from Soviet intelligence files linking him to the never consummated attempt on Tito’s life. And Grigulevich, Mikoyan informed me, had successfully defended him against a failed 1985 attempt to remove him from the editorship of Latinskaia Amerika, intervening on his behalf as a “grand inquisitor.”

At one point during that Arlington visit I asked Mikoyan about Anatolii Nikolaevich Glinkin, who had headed ILA’s country studies and international relations department, was also a graduate of the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, and had earned the doctorate in historical sciences. Glinkin was not a prolific scholar compared with many of his Latin Americanist colleagues (see, e.g., Glinkin, 1962, 1991; Glinkin, Vol’skii, and Gvozdarev, 1967) but did frequently seem to be present for visits and academic events attended by foreign scholars. We even met once in 1974 in New York City, where he was pursuing research at Columbia University. When I commented to Mikoyan that I had heard Soviet colleagues refer to Glinkin as “Major” Glinkin, he smiled and talked at length about Glinkin’s self-aggrandizement but did not directly confirm what I had implied. (Grigulevich, too, was often referred to by colleagues as “Major” Grigulevich, although at least one of them guffawed at that rank, assuring me he was “General” Grigulevich.) Glinkin, Mikoyan remarked, was now a senior research scholar and therefore felt he no longer needed to consult original sources because “everything he needed to know he conserved between his ears.”

Zorina, also among the Latin Americanists Lewis Hanke met during his January 1971 visit to the USSR, was the widow of Vladimir Mikhailovich Miroshevskii (1900–1942), considered the precursor of Soviet Latin Americanist historians. In part because of her personal relationship with Miroshevskii and their shared scholarly interest in Latin America, as well as her own senior status—older than her academic colleagues by more than a decade in most cases—she was a natural object of professional deference. She, too, enjoyed a cordial relationship with Grigulevich, who on one notable occasion raised a considerable academic row in her defense when Lavrov put forward a woman kandidat more than two decades her junior to receive the doctor of historical sciences degree before allowing her to do so. It appears to have been something of an academic slight recognizable to anyone who has spent time in academe but at the same time perhaps understandable. The candidate in question, Nina Georgievna Il’ina, had written an exhaustively documented history of Colombia from colonial times to independence (Il’ina, 1976), a genuine work of historical scholarship.

Zorina focused much of her scholarship on the history of labor in Cuba, in pursuit of which she was able to conduct research in the Archivo Nacional de Cuba (Havana) and the Archivo Histórico Regional de Santiago de Cuba (see Zorina, 1975). She was devoted to history and genuinely collegial in her relations with other scholars, including myself, whom she was kind enough to familiarize with pertinent library holdings I would not otherwise have discovered. She was, in my estimation, the quintessence of humanized scholarly endeavor, and I dedicated my Soviet Historians on Latin America (Bartley, 1978b) to her and to the memory of her deceased husband.

The two remaining individuals from Hanke’s 1971 visit were Komissarov and Shur. Komissarov was my age and an assistant professor at Leningrad State University (LSU). He held the kandidat degree in historical sciences from LSU and as a university instructor necessarily kept within required ideological bounds, yet, as he explicitly informed me when first we met in 1968, did not consider himself a Marxist. He was a disciplined research scholar who built his academic career on the extensive records of the Langsdorf expedition, housed primarily in the Leningrad branch of the Academy’s Institute of Ethnography (Shur, 1973), the utilization of which for published scholarship did not require the customary references to Marxist theory (Komissarov, 1967; 1975; 1977a; 1977b; 1987).

Shur was also a disciplined research scholar who focused on the recovery, description, and utilization of primary Russian source materials for documenting the Russian presence in the Americas during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Shur, 1964; 1967; 1971; 1973). He and Komissarov were friends, and both men were exceedingly collegial in their relationship with me. When in 1968, for example, I was unable to access a collection of papers housed in the manuscript department of the Saltykov-Shchedrin State Public Library in Leningrad (ostensibly because it had not yet been processed and was therefore not available for consultation even by Soviet scholars), they managed to have the collection microfilmed, subsequently passing the film on to a visiting University of Wisconsin colleague whose assistance I had enlisted and who then delivered it to me in Milwaukee. Shur likewise did not consider himself a Marxist. No less significant, he was a Soviet Jew embittered by the anti-Semitic attitudes he daily encountered in the USSR. In 1972 he first raised the possibility with me that he and his wife and young daughter might emigrate to Israel, which then and on subsequent visits to Moscow I tried to dissuade them from doing—not for ideological reasons but because from my Gentile perspective he had lived 40 years of his life in Soviet society, would have a very difficult time adjusting to Israeli society, and moreover would sacrifice his distinguished academic career because there would be little interest in his scholarly specialization in Israeli academic circles. He had spent many years identifying and microfilming original Russian archival collections and believed (erroneously, as it turned out) that those invaluable historical materials would ensure him academic employment in the West. When in October 1974 I arrived in Moscow on my way to Leningrad to deliver a paper at a two-hundredth anniversary celebration of G. H. von Langsdorf’s birth sponsored by the Soviet Geographical Society, Shur informed me that he and his wife had decided to emigrate and asked me to help him remove his microfilm collection from the Soviet Union. With some trepidation I was able to do that for him through an assistant cultural attaché at the U.S. embassy. A decade later, that collection was acquired by the Elmer E. Rasmuson Library at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, where it is now available for scholarly consultation.

Shur’s emigration to Israel was viewed in official Soviet academic circles as a defection, and he immediately became a nonperson, although not all Soviet colleagues viewed him that way and one or another (among them Al’perovich) continued to correspond with him. The false rumor was spread that Shur had taken original historic manuscripts with him, and further citation of his scholarly publications was immediately prohibited. Mikoyan, for one, opposed this but could not avoid it. To do so, he was advised, would cost him his editorship. Removing historic documents from the USSR, Mikoyan told me, would have had nothing to do with his prior scholarly publication. “To pretend his work didn’t exist,” he insisted, “was absurd” (R. H. Bartley papers, 1966–1996, Sergo Mikoyan file). Moreover, Shur had in fact removed not original documents but only microfilmed copies.

By the mid-1970s, Latin American area studies were virtually as developed in the USSR as they were in the United States, qualitatively if not quantitatively. Both countries had genuine Latin Americanist scholars in various disciplines; both had academic ideologues and opportunists, as well as intelligence operatives in academic clothing, and in both cases there were also outstanding academic specialists whose names might be included in a registry of “Latin Americanists” by virtue of the geographic focus of their scholarship but who did not consider themselves as such in the Cold War context that had created the “Latin Americanist” label. A notable Soviet example was the ethnographer Yurii Valentinovich Knorozov, who in 1952, at age 33, broke the Maya code while sitting at his desk in the Institute of Ethnography on the bank of the Neva River. As Knorozov’s longtime friend and colleague the Yale anthropologist Michael D. Coe has observed, it is truly astonishing that Knorozov accomplished that extraordinary mental feat never having seen “a Maya ruin, or stood in the plazas and courts of Copán, Tikal, Palenque, or Chichén Itzá; or even touched a real Maya inscription.” In the history of decipherment, Coe writes, “Knorozov ranks with the great Jean-François Champollion, the French genius who ‘cracked’ the Egyptian script in the early nineteenth century” (Coe, 1992: 11). I myself had the very good fortune to meet Knorozov in 1968 and to acquire a copy of his opus on the Maya writing system (Knorozov, 1963), together with an elegant copy of an earlier annotated translation he had published of Diego de Landa’s Relación de las cosas de Yucatán (Knorozov, 1955). Notably, Knorozov’s name does not appear in ILA’s (1971) directory of Soviet Latin Americanists.

To round out this description and evaluation of Latin American area studies in the former USSR, it is helpful to refocus our consideration of that branch of Soviet academic endeavor on efforts made by the two U.S. academic organizations most immediately interested in learning about their Soviet counterparts: CLAH and LASA. CLAH took the initiative to establish professional relations with Soviet Latin Americanist scholars on the assumption that not all Soviet Latin Americanists were ideologically brainwashed servants of the Soviet state and at least some, especially historians and ethnographers, had valuable insights to contribute to the global body of knowledge about the peoples, history, and nations of Latin America. By the time LASA became actively involved in promoting contacts with Soviet counterparts, CLAH had developed a decade’s worth of academically sound collaborative relationships.

A complicating factor in the pursuit of collaborative ties with Soviet Latin Americanists was language, since hardly any U.S. academics in the field could read or speak Russian. As a result, efforts by CLAH and LASA to establish those ties were undertaken by a tiny minority of their respective memberships and did not in either case represent an organizational priority. CLAH, in my estimation, had the more serious commitment, given the professional stature of the individuals who first promoted those efforts (Cline and Hanke). LASA, for its part, exhibited no active interest until the University of Pittsburgh political scientist Cole Blasier, a self-described “veteran of the Cold War” (Blasier, 1983: xv), was persuaded in the mid-1970s by IREX director Allen Kassof to explore the possibility of investigating Soviet Latin American studies on the ground in the USSR. Blasier traveled to Moscow in the summer of 1975, visited ILA (which he described as “the largest, and probably most prolific, research center [in the world] devoted exclusively to Latin America”), and had preliminary discussions with Vol’skii about possible collaborative relations with LASA. Although he was not a historian, he had become a member of CLAH as well and involved himself in the work of its Committee on Relations with the Socialist Countries (later renamed the Committee on International Scholarly Relations).

By training, Blasier was a Sovietologist who earned his Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University, wrote his doctoral dissertation on Soviet relations with Latin America, and then spent nine years as a U.S. Foreign Service officer in Yugoslavia, West Germany, the USSR, and Washington, DC. While he had spent significant time, worked, and done research in Latin America, he was not a well-grounded academic specialist, but through a series of fortuitous circumstances he was recruited in 1964 by the chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh to develop an interdisciplinary Latin American studies program at that institution. By the time Kassof persuaded him to investigate the status of Latin American studies in the USSR and Eastern Europe, he had effectively established that program and would soon give it added visibility through the development of collaborative relations with Latin Americanists behind the Iron Curtain.

Blasier exhibited a strong personality enveloped in a sense of social privilege and Cold War authority that imposed itself on LASA members wishing to expand contacts with their Soviet and East European colleagues. Initially, he involved himself with due professional restraint in the work of CLAH and LASA’s respective committees on scholarly relations with the USSR and Eastern Europe, but after securing through IREX and completing a four-month research residency at ILA (January–April 1979) he became something akin to an American commissar of scholarly exchanges with Soviet Latin Americanists.What had been LASA’s Committee on Scholarly Relations with the USSR and Eastern Europe now became the Task Force on US/USSR Scholarly Relations, and Blasier was appointed its chairman. The committee’s designation as a “task force” in the Cold War context immediately suggested purposes beyond collegial scholarly relations, which Blasier quickly recognized and from which he sought to dissociate himself. “Task Force is somebody else’s term!” he assured me in June 1979 (Blasier to Bartley, n.d. [June 1979], R. H. Bartley papers, 1966–1996). Perhaps that was so, but task force it remained, and he ran it in the manner of his previous Cold War Foreign Service experience. Objectives were further muddied by his institutional ties to the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Latin American Studies, where he had served as founding director from 1964 to 1974 and whose academic visibility he now sought to enhance by effectively making it the administrative center of LASA’s future exchange arrangements with the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

Blasier’s 1979 research visit to ILA was a key event in the development of relations between Soviet and U.S. Latin Americanists. It was the first and only such research visit by a U.S. Latin Americanist, although ILA had hosted and would continue to host Latin Americanist scholars from the United States for two-week visits—for example, Ronald Hilton (Stanford, 1971), E. Bradford Burns (UCLA, 1975), Timothy Harding (California State University–Los Angeles, 1978), John J. Johnson (Stanford, 1983). Twelve months prior to his trip Blasier informed several of us with an interest in promoting U.S.-Soviet academic exchanges related to Latin America that IREX was going to nominate him for the ILA visit; that his research would be on contemporary Soviet economic relations with Latin America; that to conduct that research would require approval of the USSR Academy of Sciences; and that although his own research was “separate from LASA,” prospects for developing a long-term relationship with Soviet Latin Americanists would be enhanced if his proposed research was approved (Blasier to Bartley, Fagen, Glade et al., January 19, 1978, R. H. Bartley papers, 1966–1996).

When he returned from Moscow, Blasier exhibited a noticeably less dissembled attitude of Cold War purpose. He, that attitude now conveyed, was the authority on all matters concerning LASA’s relations with the Soviets, and we Latin America specialists were to follow his lead. Up to that point, he stated in a memo to LASA Task Force members, U.S. and Soviet Latin Americanist scholars had for a decade been conducting “informal” scholarly exchanges, and it was now time to formalize such contacts through existing channels of U.S.-Soviet cultural exchange, namely, the U.S./USSR Commission on the Social Sciences and the Humanities. The U.S. side of the exchanges, he told us, needed organizational sponsorship, and LASA was “the most broadly representative organization” of U.S. Latin America specialists. American participation in the official exchanges, in turn, was organized and administered by IREX, with whose director he had been in communication since the mid-1970s. Our function as LASA Task Force members, Blasier informed us, would be “to provide advice on our national purposes and the substance and conduct of its exchanges” (Blasier memorandum to LASA Task Force on US/USSR Scholarly Relations, August 29, 1979, R. H. Bartley papers, 1966–1996).

His reference to “our national purposes” was opaque and seemingly at odds with our presumed scholarly priorities. Coming as it did from his ongoing discussions with Kassof, however, it immediately raised the specter of the Cold War and IREX’s history as an institutional agent of that global conflict. From 1958 to 1968 student and scholarly exchanges with the USSR were administered on the U.S. side by the Inter-University Committee on Travel Grants (IUCTG). When in 1967 Ramparts magazine revealed CIA involvement in the National Student Association, it quickly developed that Agency people were active in other cultural organizations as well, including the IUCTG, whose director Robert F. Byrnes subsequently acknowledged his own CIA ties (Byrnes, 1988). The IUCTG was hastily replaced by the IREX, which would oversee U.S. academic exchanges with the USSR from that point on (Bartley, 2001: 574–575n; Richmond, 1987).

That IREX would have been free of CIA influence was improbable, and, given Blasier’s academic and Foreign Service background, it is not unreasonable to wonder what role, if any, he might have played in this regard. Certainly his academic interest was narrowly focused on Soviet involvement in Latin America and ILA as the core institution producing scholarship reflective of that involvement. The book that resulted from his research at ILA, The Giant’s Rival: The USSR and Latin America, exemplified Blasier’s rather narrow interest in Latin American area studies, as did the 20-page overview of Soviet Latin Americanists that he appended to that volume (Blasier, 1983: 171–190). While in Moscow he made an effort to meet Latin America specialists in institutions outside ILA, and a reader of his book gets a general sense of their distribution throughout the Soviet academic world, but those meetings were superficial and offer little insight into their scholarly contributions.

From my own experience it is not at all clear that Blasier fully understood who his primary associates at ILA actually were. He expressed effusive gratitude for the collegial research assistance he received from ILA’s staff and his indebtedness to its “scholars” Vol’skii, Lev Klochkovskii, Glinkin, A. D. Maevskii, Anatolii Borovkov, and Piotr Yakovlev. Vol’skii, of course, was ILA’s director. Klochkovskii and Glinkin were heads, respectively, of its economics and country studies/international relations departments, key administrative slots that included foreign travel well beyond the possibilities of most Soviet academics. Maevskii was not a scholar but “a former government official” who had served in Latin America and at the time Blasier met him was in charge of ILA’s Department of International Liaison, which oversaw all of the institute’s relations with foreign persons and organizations. I was advised by Soviet colleagues that Maevskii was a state security (KGB) officer. Borovkov served as his deputy but did possess academic credentials as a Latin Americanist, and Yakovlev, likewise a credentialed Latin Americanist, accompanied Blasier on most of his appointments while in Moscow.

Some years later both Borovkov and Yakovlev would be assigned to Latin America as “correspondents” for Latinskaia Amerika (each accompanied by his spouse and provided with a comfortable apartment),the former to Mexico City, the latter to Buenos Aires, where Sylvia and I had occasion to visit each of them. When I commented to Mikoyan during my 1994 Arlington visit that circumstances suggested Borovkov and Yakovlev might have been intelligence operatives, he smiled noncommittally, saying only that Borovkov had been a mediocre contributor to Latinskaia Amerika. Another Russian present that evening quipped with a laugh, “Oh, they were reporting all right, just not to the journal.”

While Blasier in his Cold War frame of mind was busily collecting every detail of ILA operations he could, this core group of ILA staff was carefully evaluating him. The political profiles of U.S. Latin Americanists that Vol’skii had unsuccessfully proposed I compile back in 1968 they, of course, were perfectly capable of compiling themselves and certainly did. That, I suspect, was the principal reason they approved Blasier’s four-month research proposal in the first place. They no doubt knew about his previous Foreign Service career, which had included a stint in Moscow, and would likely suspect ulterior motives in his efforts to promote a LASA relationship with ILA. In October 1980 Vol’skii, Klochkovskii, and Borovkov traveled to Pittsburgh to negotiate a formal exchanges agreement with LASA. Blasier and I were the principal LASA negotiators. The accord we reached and endorsed called for annual joint symposia held alternately in the United States and the USSR on previously agreed-upon subjects. The initial symposium was tentatively scheduled for the second quarter of 1981, to be held in Moscow on the theme “The Place of Latin America in the Contemporary World,” with a follow-up symposium the next year in the United States, possibly on the topic “Transnational Corporations and the Economic Development of Latin America.” Visiting delegations were to number no more than seven participants and would be hosted in the sponsoring country for a two-week period. Spanish was to be the principal language (R. H. Bartley papers, 1966–1996).

The initial symposium was held in the USSR during the second two weeks of June 1981. The American delegation numbered seven: Blasier, myself, Richard E. Feinberg (Woodrow Wilson Center fellow), Robert Kaufman (Princeton University), Abraham Lowenthal (Woodrow Wilson Center), Carmelo Mesa-Lago (University of Pittsburgh), and Alejandro Portes (Johns Hopkins University). The two weeks of institutional visits included three days in Kiev for meetings with Latin America specialists at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences’s Institute of Social and Economic Problems and the University of Kiev’s Faculty of International Relations and Law. There was also an official reception and dinner for the two delegations hosted by U.S. chargé d’affaires Jack Matlock at Spaso House, the ambassadorial residence in Moscow.

With the exception of one paper (Carmelo Mesa-Lago), which because of the presenter’s need to leave the USSR early was discussed at a separate session in Moscow, the main symposium was held at the Academy’s Púshchino biological sciences campus, 100 kilometers south of Moscow on the Oka River. All the Soviet presenters were affiliated with ILA: the economists Vol’skii, Aleksandr Karavaev, Klochkovskii, Igor Sheremetev, and Konstantin Tarasov and the historians Glinkin and Shul’govskii. The quality of the papers and the discussion varied but overall was good, with the two delegations on comparable academic levels. Discussion was sometimes intense and in various ways revealed the underlying Cold War perspectives that infused Latin American area studies generally.

For my own part, I dwelt on the geopolitical determinants of that academic field, arguing that in both the United States and the USSR area studies programs, including on Latin America, had come into being not out of simple scholarly interest but as a response to nation-state demands for trained foreign-area-savvy personnel capable of furthering the geopolitical objectives of their respective national governments. The fact that a “scholarly” field called Latin American area studies had originated in the United States, the USSR, and other major powers rather than in Latin America itself was indicative, I suggested, of its ulterior, nonscholarly purposes. Indeed, the fact that we Latin Americanists from the world’s then two superpowers were gathered in Púshchino to discuss Latin American affairs without the presence of any colleagues from Latin America only underscored the intellectually compromised nature of our endeavor. ² Our respective countries, after all, were the principal Cold War contenders, and the LASA/ILA exchange could only be viewed as a reflection of that global confrontation.

Soviet responses to my characterization of Latin American area studies as a Cold War–engendered field of scholarship from outside Latin America ranged from insistence that there were in fact Latin American specialists who studied their regional problems to a defensive rejection of the notion that Soviet Latin American area studies had developed in response to U.S. Latin Americanist programs (which I had neither implied nor believed) to Vol’skii’s observation that not all Western Latin Americanists served as instruments of imperial domination to Glinkin’s remark that “to call Latin Americans ‘Latin Americanists’ is like calling Soviets who study Soviet reality ‘Sovietologists.’” Comments from my LASA delegation colleagues were uniformly critical. My paper was extensively documented with official and firsthand sources establishing the links between the development of Latin American area studies programs in the United States and U.S. Cold War objectives throughout the hemisphere. It especially documented in that context the utilization of the social sciences to achieve geopolitical ends and the institutional role of private foundations in supporting and promoting the application of academic work in those fields to the projection of U.S. influence in Latin America. Blasier protested that the foundations (Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie) were independent, while Portes offered the non sequitur that many U.S. Latin Americanists who had become radicalized by their experiences in Latin America had been supported by those same foundations. LASA, he insisted, was itself a largely “progressive” organization.

Responding to passing references I had made to subversive CIA operations (Project Camelot in Chile and Plan Simpático in Colombia), ³ Blasier stated that such activities had been conducted in the Cold War context of the 1950s and 1960s and “weren’t done anymore”—a patently false assertion in the light of the raging U.S.-promoted dirty wars of the 1960s and 1970s and on the eve of the Reagan-era travesties of the 1980s. I was historically out of touch, he suggested, and in his own presentation declared: “The past is past and no longer of interest. Today’s Latin Americans don’t care about history. They are only interested in the present and the future.” My problem, clearly, was that I did not exhibit proper delegation posture on the ideological issues before us or blindly accept American Cold War verities about life and scholarship in the USSR. Moreover, Blasier exhibited a distinct need to control the American delegation rather than simply serve as a collegial guide for the six worldly adults who accompanied him. He had arrived in Moscow a day after the rest of us and, while we were walking together that afternoon, proposed that we return to our hotel to “strategize” about our participation in the LASA/ILA symposium. When I declined because of an invitation for Sylvia and me to spend that evening at the home of a Soviet colleague (Al’perovich) and then walked to a nearby Metro entrance and disappeared, he was nonplussed. (Sylvia’s presence was also an issue, as I had arranged for her to accompany me directly with Vol’skii without Blasier’s intervention.) When we saw each other the next morning he was angry, demanding to know where we had gone, whom we had seen, and what we had done. He struck me immediately as a caricature of the “communist commissar” riding herd on Soviet delegations traveling abroad so widely portrayed in those years by U.S. Cold War propagandists. I was also, I suspect, a personal challenge simply because I knew the local milieu, the language, and our Soviet Latin Americanist colleagues at least as well as he did.

Viewed now from the perspective of three and a half decades and all that has transpired in the world since, it is enlightening to note the ideological disconnects underlying the intellectual rigidities on both sides of the Púshchino symposium but especially on the part of the U.S. delegation. Basic “Marxist” concepts of economically determined societal structures, economic classes, class conflict, ruling class exploitation, etc., that are now accepted in everyday public parlance as obvious were anathema to mainstream American academics in the Cold War years and prevented six of the LASA delegation’s members from seriously addressing key Soviet interpretations of Latin American reality. In my judgment, the most interesting and insightful presentation of the Púshchino symposium was offered by Shul’govskii, who presented a comparative analysis of U.S. and Latin American studies of sociopolitical problems affecting economic development in Latin America from the late 1950s through the 1970s (Shul’govskii, 1981). He was my Soviet counterpart in the session on ideological currents in contemporary Latin American area studies. Whereas I focused on the creation of area studies as an academic field that reflected Cold War thinking, Shul’govskii provided an excellent overview of evolving ideological perspectives on the part of Latin American and U.S. economists and social scientists concerned with the region’s economic development, from support for capitalist-driven industrialization to various mixed-economy arrangements to socialist approaches inspired by the Cuban Revolution. He likewise reviewed Western Hemisphere thinking on issues of wealth distribution and desired roles of the different social strata and institutional players in Latin American society, including the military and the “middle class.” Here he dealt at some length with John J. Johnson’s 1958 volume Political Change in Latin America: The Emergence of the Middle Sectors and the diverse reactions to it in Latin America. In sum, Shul’govskii made an informed scholarly presentation refreshingly free of ideologically loaded terminology and thus demonstrated that, as in the United States, in the USSR genuine scholarship on politically controversial topics was possible.

“The meetings in Moscow, Kiev and Pushino [sic],” Blasier (1981) reported to LASA, “proved that constructive discussion about Latin America between scholars of the two countries is possible and that good personal relationships are able to prevent conflicting ideological and political positions from ending dialog.” CLAH, of course, had already demonstrated that years before. Five years later, ironically, Blasier himself would get into a heated exchange with Vol’skii at the fourth LASA/ILA symposium, held in Leningrad in June 1986, that effectively terminated dialog between the two sides. I had been sidelined by Blasier from further involvement in LASA’s dealings with the Soviets following the 1981 symposium and learned some of the details of the Blasier-Vol’skii confrontation only a year later from Yakovlev and Borovkov respectively in Buenos Aires and Mexico City. Yakovlev had been the Soviet presenter paired with Blasier in a session devoted to the topic “External Factors in Latin American Revolutions,” an inherently charged subject that during the discussion phase of that session breached the bounds of professional decorum in an offensive verbal exchange between Blasier and Vol’skii that from Vol’skii’s perspective placed Blasier squarely in the Cold War enemy camp, thus precluding further collaboration with him. Yakovlev and Borovkov lamented what had happened and felt that both men shared the blame but accepted the fact that for the time being the LASA/ILA exchange was over. From my perspective in retrospect, the better part of the blame rests with Blasier, whose Cold War commitment precluded his fostering an invaluable exchange of knowledge and insights between U.S. and Soviet Latin Americanists.

Both academic establishments, Soviet and American, were constrained by Cold War political imperatives and accompanying mindsets that hampered but did not preclude the pursuit and achievement of genuine scholarship. On the Soviet side, Mikoyan nicely captured the essence of the ideological issue when, in the fall of 1990, he published his resignation statement as editor of Latinskaia Amerika (Mikoyan, 1992). Recounting his determined efforts to keep the journal’s pages open to diverse points of view and the resultant problems he had over the years with Communist Party censors, he recalled one particular encounter in which he was asked, “Is it your place to discuss matters that have not yet been clarified and for which there is no established view?” That individual was not “congenitally stupid,” he observed; his logic simply operated within the limits of the “anti-world” that characterized official CPSU ideology. A typical Soviet witticism of the time described such thinking as “mature,” he noted, and he and his editorial staff preferred to remain “immature.” I, too, confronted analogous “mature” Cold War mindsets on the American side and, likewise, chose to remain “immature.”

In the closing years of the USSR, impending sea changes to the Soviet system began to make themselves felt subtly in the country’s academic world, allowing greater opportunity for foreign travel and thus for me to meet with a number of my Soviet colleagues in Mexico and the United States, including with Al’perovich in Boston and in Mexico City. ILA remained anxious to renew exchange relations with LASA, but Blasier had left that relationship in such disarray that there appeared to be little inclination to do so on LASA’s part. Interest did develop, however, within the Pacific Coast Council on Latin American Studies (PCCLAS), and I was able to arrange for Borovkov to participate in two annual meetings, one in 1988 in Mexicali, Mexico, and the other in 1989 in Sacramento, California. He presented timely papers at both meetings— “La perestroika, glasnost y las relaciones soviético-latinoamericanas” and “Relaciones Este-Oeste y América Central,” the latter based in part on his Latinskaia Amerika–related journalistic travels in Central America. He and I and two or three other PCCLAS colleagues had explored the possibility of establishing an exchange relationship with ILA, but the USSR ceased to exist before we could do so. Sylvia and I saw him and Vol’skii for the last time four and a half months later in Mexico City, where we had a long evening conversation about regional developments and an investigation Sylvia and I were conducting into the assassination of renowned Mexican columnist Manuel Buendía (Bartley and Bartley, 2015: 189–191, 464 n. 22).

In light of this general overview of Soviet Latin American area studies, perhaps the best encapsulation of the nature, quality, and human component of that academic endeavor to which I can refer interested readers is a handsome 280-page annotated and richly illustrated collection of selected writings by Simón Bolívar, leader of northern South America’s independence struggle against Spain, compiled by Shul’govskii, introduced by Grigulevich, and published in 1983 by the USSR Academy of Sciences Press to mark the two-hundredth anniversary of Bolívar’s birth (Shul’govskii, 1983). Simón Bolívar: Izbrannye proizvedeniia is above all a work of genuine scholarship achieved in a time of severe ideological contention. The three-man editorial board that oversaw production of the book (Vol’skii, Grigulevich, and Shul’govskii) was a striking mix of bureaucratic, secret service, and academic experience that nonetheless produced a serious original contribution to the historical literature on Latin America, above all for a Russian readership. The book contains 67 selections of Bolívar’s writings penned between 1812 and 1830—speeches, articles, letters, and proclamations—meticulously rendered in Russian by a team of three ILA translators overseen by Shul’govskii, with special care taken to preserve a sense of Bolívar’s writing style and to convey to contemporary readers the nuanced meanings of common political terms from Bolívar’s day such as “republic,” “constitution,” “democracy,” “fatherland,” “nation,” “freedom,” and “citizen.”

Grigulevich, identified as a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences and of the Academia Nacional de Historia de Venezuela, introduces the book with a thoughtful essay on Bolívar as a political and military figure and the ideologist of South American independence. Shul’govskii annotates Bolívar’s translated writings and contributes a 44-page, extensively footnoted concluding essay on the social and political ideals of Simón Bolívar. “Historical merit,” he quotes Lenin in an opening epigraph, “is judged not by what historical actors achieve compared with the demands of their times but rather by what they achieve compared with their predecessors.” That may be true enough of figures like Simón Bolívar, but in the case of Soviet Latin Americanists I have discussed here, Shul’govskii included, their historical merit derives from what they achieved despite the obstacles of our time.