Moniz Bandeira, the militant young Marxist director of Polítiea Operária during the early 1960s, has joined with two other Brazilian journalists, also admirers of the Bolshevik Revolution, to compile an account of that revolution’s effects on Brazil. The result is a fascinating story of six years filled with social strife and conflicting pronouncements about what was happening in Russia.

The authors have made extensive use of newspapers and other records, such as the celebrated collection of the 86-year-old anarchist Edgard Leuenroth. The eleven documents in the Appendix are gems. The last of them, for example, is the report in which Antônio Canellas in 1923 tells of his inability to persuade the Comintern in 1922 that the newly formed Partido Comunista do Brasil (PCB) was a true Communist party. (The PCB, thought Trotsky, was afflicted with Anarchist ideas.)

Even before the Bolshevik Revolution broke out, the six-year era in Brazil had been appropriately baptized with the São Paulo general strike of 1917. It was, says Leuenroth, a “spontaneous movement” (p. 57). The proletariat, uninterested in politics, but turned desperate by privations and long working-hours, bested the authorities and their charging police brigades. Then came the big news from Russia, presented to us through the eyes of the Brazilian press and politicians. “Of the fruits of the policies of the Kaiser and the Czar,” said Rui Barbosa, “the most grave is not the war.. . . It is the anarchy . . .” (p. 212).

With Socialism reportedly prevailing in Germany and Hungary, as well as in Russia, some Brazilians trembled. Others fought. Police Chief Aurelino Leal is pictured as the ruthless “Carioca Trepov” (p. 41). Anarchists who planned the Rio insurrection of November 1918 had more in mind than improving working conditions. Professor José Oiticica, João da Costa Pimenta, Astrojildo Pereira and Agripino Nazaré wanted to follow the Bolshevik example and use bombs to set up “a genuinely popular government” (p. 143).

Pages are crowded with worker demands, rallies, May Day demonstrations, the destruction of proletarian press organs, and the organization and closing down of labor uniões, associações and federações. “Long live anarchy!” (p. 162) exclaimed the founders of the first short-lived PCB in 1919. Imprisonments and deportations were numerous. For example, Everardo Dias, of Spanish origin, was not allowed to disembark in Spain or Holland; he could only return in his ship to Brazil.

Above all, the pages tell of strikes. The great strikes of 1919 included the one in Pernambuco which featured the spirited Joaquim Pimenta and the peaceful one in Bahia, where Governor Antônio Moniz (Moniz Bandeira’s great uncle) so sympathized with the workers that, as Rui Barbosa shouted, “the government here inspires . . . the staging of Communism” (p. 188). Our only suggested changes have to do with two passages (pp. 197 and 200) stating that events in Rio during September and early November 1919 were affected by the fact that Epitácio Pessoa was about to be inaugurated. He had been in office since July 28, 1919.

“The defeat of the proletariat in Germany and Hungary gave new spirit to the dominant classes.. . . The bourgeoisie, recovering from the fright caused by the strikes of 1917, 1918, and 1919, increased repression and terror, while there were reformist itchings by some of the more astute politicians” (pp. 255-256). Forty thousand Russian refugees are said to have come to Brazil, many becoming strike-breakers, company watchmen, and civilian guards. As strikes became less effective, labor leaders split between those who remained faithful to Anarchism and those attracted to Bolshevism. Among the former was Professor Oiticica. “Full of melancholy” (p. 279), he came to hate Astrojildo Pereira; he blamed him for attracting the “dedicated and very kind” (p. 279) Otávio Brandão to Bolshevism.

This is an extremely useful book.