Daniela Spenser's latest book is a welcome translation of her 2009 work Los primeros tropiezos de la internacional comunista en México. It augments her considerable body of work on the relationship between Soviet Russia and Mexico throughout what we may now call with some confidence the ‘Long Cold War’. Spenser here focuses on its first decade, tracking the initial contacts between agents of the Communist International and the victors of the Mexican Revolution. Spenser highlights not only the mismatch in perceptions between the two sides but also the complex and variable nature of their diplomatic and ideological ties.
In its initial phase, the Russian Revolution was a great inspiration to the more radical among Mexico's political leaders and thinkers. Spenser notes that both Emiliano Zapata and Ricardo Flores Magón were captivated by their Russian contemporaries: ‘both the agrarista and the anarchist had identified with the Bolshevik Revolution as an emancipatory movement fighting for justice that represented the collective dream of the disinherited’ (p. 36). However, this fascination soon soured, and Spenser's narrative is ultimately one of misunderstanding and divergence. It is a truism in both the historiography and political rhetoric of post-1917 Mexico that a Soviet-style revolution was unnecessary because Mexico had already undergone its own equivalent. Spenser's thesis is subtly different, and more convincing: rather than the fact of the Mexican Revolution having preceded its Russian ‘counterpart’, it was instead the lingering unfulfilled potential of the Mexican uprising which gave it longevity and resilience.
Stumbling Its Way through Mexico opens with two contextualising chapters, the first on Soviet Russia and international communism (or, rather, communist internationalism), and the second painting a vivid picture of Mexico (and particularly radical and/or labour organisations and thinkers) in the early twentieth century. It is through this pincer manoeuvre that Spenser achieves her multi-layered analysis, asking how agents of one set of interacting contexts (the Soviet, the Russian, the international communist) encountered those of another (the Mexican, the anarcho-syndicalist, the post-Revolutionary). Spenser convincingly argues that the Mexican political context was sufficiently ingrained’ and different enough from that of Russia, to resist the overtures of the under-informed Bolsheviks. The depiction here of revolutionary Mexico is a fascinating contribution to that literature in its own right, focusing on the gaggle of international radicals, pacifists, anarchists, communists, anti-colonialists, who met, organised and fervently discussed global politics during Carranza's presidency.
The third chapter foregrounds the individuals who ‘stumbled’ through Mexico in this period. It is a crucial reconstruction of a phase (and mentality) in communist history so often overlooked: one of discovery, relative open-mindedness, and of collegiality. This should not come as a surprise, yet the legacy of Stalinism and the puzzling inertia of monolithic conceptions of communism tend to obscure many such heterodoxies. Spenser reminds us after all that the Comintern did not begin as the international arm of the CPSU; it only became so, effectively, in the late 1920s.
The tragedy of the tale revolves around the encounter between international communists and Mexican revolutionaries (covered in chapter 4) and consequent problems (chapters 5 and 6), ultimately including the breakdown of relations between the fledgling Mexican Communist Party and the governing elite in the late 1920s. This caused a rift between the governments of Mexico and the USSR which never fully healed, and certainly prevented the sort of revolutionary fraternity which both had considered possible in the early 1920s.
While the Bolshevik agents and their contacts back in the USSR might have misread the potential for (and logical route to) communism in Mexico, they did give some strong insights into the nature of the Mexican Revolution. Charles Phillips, arriving in Mexico in 1918, noted that the revolution ‘postulated the good life for the millions, and the masses responded’. Despite the overthrow of the old regime, the ‘(largely Indian) peons, miners and city workers were still savagely exploited, but every general and politician had to pay lip-service to their latent power’ (pp. 66–7). Contemporary historians struggle to summarise the Mexican Revolution so well.
The importance of ethnicity and its interplay with socio-economic status was not lost on Phillips; in a private meeting, Lenin agreed with him that ‘the Indians … should be [the] number-one objective in the countryside’ (p. 71). Given the decades of argument engendered by the Lenin-Roy theses on potential communist allies in ‘backward and colonial nations’, Lenin's position here is noteworthy. Indeed, Spenser's portrayal of these early agents of international communism suggests a good deal of heterodoxy, giving important context to the mariateguista variant of Marxism (often notable in Latin America as the path not taken).
Between The Impossible Triangle (1999), In from the Cold (2008, ed. with Gilbert Joseph) and this volume, Daniela Spenser has provided a loose trilogy telling the story of the Long Cold War at all structural layers: from the travels (and indeed travails) of individual agents of Bolshevism to the intergovernmental tussles of the 1930s and the hemispheric interventions and influences of the United States. For historians of twentieth-century Mexico this volume has important explanatory value, but it should reach a wider audience for its depiction of a tentative, sometimes bumbling, and above all uncertain international communism; it is a welcome corrective to the troubling return of monolithic conceptions thereof.
