As its title suggests, this book is an indictment of the policies of the United States government and business community toward Salvador Allende’s Chile. Its fundamental assertion is that United States business monopolies, especially the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation, with the enthusiastic aid of the CIA, masterminded and initiated the coup against Allende’s government. Additionally, it blames the United States economic and political system for continuing to support the “fascist” government under Pinochet that has existed in Chile since the 1973 coup.
While Sergeyev’s intent is clearly tendentious, the rigorous documentation throughout much of the book makes it clear that the author has done his research carefully, if not entirely objectively. His sources include United States government documents (used extensively), Philip Agee (Inside the Company), Anthony Sampson (The Sovereign State of ITT), Jack Anderson, the Washington Post, and the New York Times among others, with Soviet and Western Marxist sources appearing in the minority by far. As a result, Sergeyev’s presentation of material is not to be faulted; indeed, much of what he writes has become generally accepted in Western countries, and there is little in it that is even potentially controversial.
His general interpretations, however, are more open to question, grounded as they are in an exclusively Marxist-Leninist view of political and economic developments. As theory predicted, for example, in Sergeyev’s study, power in the United States had fallen into the hands of the multinational monopolist corporations; and United States political figures (Nixon and Kissinger, most notably), as well as Latin American reactionaries, had come under their direct control. The death of Allende, of his socialist experiment, and of Chilean democracy were solely the product of an unconscionable intervention by United States business interests and their pawns in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation. By stressing this condemnation of United States policy, however, Sergeyev omits any real discussion of the numerous problems with which the Allende government was faced internally, and which at times it served to exacerbate. In emphasizing external developments, Sergeyev provides his readers with a highly unbalanced, frequently almost self-righteous, and at times simplistic and overly doctrinaire account of events in Chile in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Still, even considering these weaknesses, the book is nonetheless impressive in dealing with at least some of the features involved in United States activities in Chile with respect to the Allende government. While Sergeyev does not write the whole truth, much of what he does say is true, and his concluding analysis of the humanitarian and economic horrors of Chile under the present government shows much insight and understanding of conditions in the country. Consequently, like so many other Soviet books on Latin America, Sergeyev’s is both very good and very bad in that its ideological determinism detracts from its generally sound historical and analytical basis.
Finally, a minor comment should be made on the book’s highly eccentric translation into English. While the translator knows United States speech well enough to use current jargon, at times what he says is almost indecipherable, and materials originally in English were apparently translated into Russian, then retranslated into English, with bizarre results. Progress Publishers will have to do much better than this if they hope to reach English-speaking readers in the future.
