This volume represents the first serious effort to produce a university-level textbook in Latin American history for students enrolled in Soviet institutions of higher learning. As such, it reflects the growing significance which Soviet scholars, educators and political leaders attach to the study of Latin American history. This is further revealed in the size of the edition, which, numbering 16,000 copies, contrasts markedly with the more modest editions characteristic of specialized historical studies.
Entitled “The Modern History of the Latin American Countries,” this volume seeks to provide the student with a general overview of Latin American history from the period of conquest and colonization through the second world war. Prepared by two scholars of international reputation, it carries a stamp of professional excellence uncharacteristic of many earlier writings in this field. Its style is lucid and refreshingly free of the stilted rhetorical forms frequently associated with Soviet scholarship. An appended bibliography adds to the volume’s utility as a textbook, although the selection of non-Russian titles leaves much to be desired.
The authors focus attention on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their discussion of the colonial period is intentionally cursory and, one would assume, meant to provide the necessary background for a proper understanding of the modern period. Regrettably, Al’perovich and Slëzkin in limiting themselves to a skeletal recounting of the colonial experience, fail to examine that experience as a determinant of subsequent historical processes.
The general organization of this volume differs from more traditional formats observed in some of the better known American text-books. The book is divided into three sections of several chapters each entitled respectively: 1) “The Independence Movement of the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century;” 2) “The Latin American Countries Following the War of Independence;” and 3) “Latin America Between the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.” Within this format, the authors trace the independence movement on a continent-wide scale, turning then to the national histories of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba and Mexico. Limitations of space, it is stated, obliged the authors to treat the remaining Latin American republics only when and to the degree they prove central to historical events of particular import.
A good argument can be made for this approach and indeed its virtues may outnumber those of more standard surveys. In the present instance, however, it is not wholly successful, and leaves the reader with an uncomfortable sense of disjointedness. Failure, for example, to treat the central Andean republics except as protagonists in the War of the Pacific while assigning two chapters to post-independence Paraguay requires some justification beyond the inevitable limitations of space. Something more than passing reference to Colombia and Venezuela likewise is wanting.
A more serious shortcoming is the authors’ failure to develop themes of continuity and change as unifying threads in what otherwise amounts to a topical collage. This might have been done in a separate chapter or perhaps within each individual chapter. As it now stands, this volume provides the groundwork for a solid textbook in modern Latin American history. Such a work, however, remains to be written.
