Notes of a Latin Americanist

It is a short walk from Moscow’s Vernadskii Prospekt metro station to the block of high-rise apartment buildings where M. S. Al’perovich occupies a comfortable sixth-floor flat with his gracious, soft-spoken wife, Elena Atakova. The flat’s spacious sitting room, which doubles as the scholar’s study, is appointed with modern Scandinavian-style furnishings, including natural-finished bookcases along two walls containing a voluminous library of Russian and foreign works on Latin America. A number of wall hangings and other New World artifacts confirm the presence of the Latin Americanist scholar.

Al’perovich’s easy manner, discerning eyes, and trimmed dark hair (there is but a suggestion of graying) belie his almost sixty-four years and the physical toll of difficult times. He converses fluently in Spanish, albeit with the distinctive vowels and intonation of his native tongue—like many of his Soviet colleagues, he has had little opportunity to polish his language skills in the field. He thoroughly dominates the scholarly literature, however, and has known personally or through correspondence many of the leading figures of Latin Americanist historiography.

While not a household name outside the academic communities of Eastern Europe, Al’perovich is nonetheless well known in Latin Americanist circles here and abroad. Scholars know him primarily through the Spanish-language editions of his works on Mexico, which, notwithstanding flaws acknowledged by the author himself, have elicited favorable appraisals by Mexican and other specialists alike. The undeniable professionalism of these works, additionally reflected in numerous historiographical and research pieces also available in translation, has earned Al’perovich growing esteem and recognition among non–Russian-speaking historians on both sides of the Atlantic.

Al’perovich’s great virtue is his uncompromising commitment to critical scholarship, a commitment solidly grounded on an exceptionally broad knowledge of world history. He is, in a real sense, the historian’s historian. He brings fresh insight to a well-defined subfield of history, which, for all its vitality and richness, is free neither of parochialism nor intellectual rigidity. From the spatial and experiential remove of the Eurasian landmass, from a historical identity dissimilar to any other, and through the prism of historical materialism, Al’perovich applies the universal canons of scholarly inquiry to the Latin American past.

Unable himself to probe at will the archives and manuscript repositories of the Latin American republics, he critically scrutinizes the work of others who enjoy ready access to the primary sources. He reformulates their questions, restates the hypotheses—focuses, in a word, on the historiography of Latin America.

At the same time, Al’perovich contributes original research on carefully chosen topics where access to the sources is not insuperable. Here, he has shown himself to be a master of research techniques and a consummate sleuth, turning up evidence in the most unlikely places, securing copies of key sources through colleagues abroad, and making the fullest possible use of published materials as well as the pertinent manuscript holdings of Soviet repositories. His research endeavors, in turn, reflect a considered balance between feasible topics of broader field significance (e.g., Mexican independence, the Mexican Revolution, Paraguay under Francia) and those suggested by the availability of specialized sources (e.g., Russian policy toward and interests in colonial Spanish America).

Al’perovich also devotes time to writing semipopular works and textbooks on Latin American history. Indeed, he has played a major role in providing the Soviet public with a structured overview of that history, a subject and world area about which there was almost total ignorance in the USSR only two or three decades ago.

There are important insights to be gained from the autobiographical account that follows. HAHR readers will be struck, no doubt, by the universally recognizable factors of personality and circumstance that shape and determine academic careers. They will discover common reference points in the academic experience and, perhaps for the first time, gain an intimate, if fleeting, glimpse into the human reality of a Soviet colleague.

Al’perovich, it is worth pointing out, makes at least three significant contributions in this piece. First, he demystifies the Soviet scholar by linking often little-understood ideological persuasions to generalizable biographical experiences with which others can readily identify. Second, he offers valuable insight into the intellectual formation of Soviet historians and thus provides a basis for fruitful comparisons. And third, by describing his own professional activities and the criteria that inform them, he makes possible a more thoughtful appraisal of Soviet contributions to the field of Latin American history.

One insufferably hot Moscow day in June 1981, I received a letter from Albuquerque, from Professor John J. Johnson, Managing Editor of the Hispanic American Historical Review, requesting an interview for the journal, or, alternatively, that I myself write a piece about my life and work. Having considered this flattering proposal, I prefer the latter approach and shall set down my thoughts in writing.

And so, taking advantage of the opportunity I have kindly been given, I shall try to respond to the questions posed by the editors of the HAHR based on my personal view of the factors that have determined the scope of my scholarly and professional interests as a historian concerned with Latin America. What I shall say in this regard seeks essentially to elucidate the following questions. Why did I decide to become a historian and why did I choose the study of the Latin American countries as my area of specialization? How has my work in this field evolved and what, in my view, have I accomplished? What am I working on at the present? And what do I think about the direction the field is taking?

When I think now about how I became a historian, various reasons come to mind. Most probably, the key role was played by a natural inclination I have felt since childhood toward the humanities, the result of aptitude and a certain cast of mind. Although in school I more or less conscientiously learned the required paragraphs in our physics and chemistry textbooks, I never really understood these subjects and was even less attracted to engineering, which was so popular in those days among many young people. I did enjoy mathematics, it is true, but I definitely showed a preference for literature, geography, and, above all, history.

This love of history was particularly apparent in my passion for Russian and translated historical novels: Aleksei Tolstoi’s Peter I; I. I. Lazhechnikov’s House of Ice and The Heretic; Anatolii Vinogradov’s Three Colors of Time, The Black Consul, and The Condemnation of Paganini; the ever popular (in Russia) Spartaco, by Raffaele Giovagnoli; and Ethel Lillian Voynich’s The Gadfly; the works of Walter Scott, Alexandre Dumas, père, and Henry Rider Haggard; the books of Lion Feuchtwanger, which were in vogue at that time; Heinrich Mann’s The Youth of Henri IV; Aleksandr Głowacki’s (pseud. Boleslaw Prus) The Pharaoh; and others.

At the same time, my awakening interest in history was indirectly furthered, too, as paradoxical as it may sound, by shortcomings in the way history was taught. That was an era of searching and experimentation in school education and the curriculum at that time did not include any systematic course in history. Instead, we made studies, influenced by a vulgar sociologism, of the revolutionary movements of previous epochs. Among the main ones were the sixteenth-century peasant war in Germany, the Dutch and English revolutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the popular uprisings led by S. Razin and E. Pugachëv in Russia, the great French Revolution, the Decembrist movement, the European revolutions of 1848, the Civil War of 1861-65 in the United States, the Paris Commune of 1871, the Russian Revolution of 1905-7, and so on. The history of Antiquity, of the early and high Middle Ages, of the Eastern countries (with the exception of the Taiping Rebellion in China and the Sepoy Rebellion in India), not to mention Latin America, was not taught at all in our schools. As noted by the academician N.M. Druzhinin, in the early 1930s “the teaching of history in the secondary schools was in fact reduced to a minimum and was abstract and sketchy in nature.”¹

In view of the lack of textbooks, the teacher recommended that on our own we read some “adult” historical literature. I remember studying in those years the Communist Manifesto, Engels’s The Peasant War in Germany, Georgii Plekhanov’s The Role of the Individual in History, M. N. Pokrovskii’s Brief History of Russia, Early Bourgeois Revolutions, by N.M. Pakul and V. F. Semënov, and other works. It goes without saying that I did not understand much of what was in these works, yet reading them greatly broadened my horizons and evoked in me a desire to augment my meager store of knowledge about the past.

By the end of secondary school, I was leaning more and more toward a career as a professional historian. But there were obstacles to actually making that decision stemming from a possible alternative: I was also attracted to medicine. The matter was finally resolved, as often happens, by circumstances. Shortly after completing my secondary school exams, I had an opportunity to visit the morgue at the Institute of Forensic Medicine, where with my own eyes I observed an autopsy and the preparation of cadavers. This was not a very pleasant sight, and the distinctive nauseating smell that filled that place (which, however, did not prevent the lab students there from devouring their sandwiches with gusto) produced such a strong aversion in me that I immediately lost all desire to devote myself to medicine. All this seems, of course, quite unimportant, a simple flight of light-mindedness, but at the time I was not yet eighteen. In any case, in the fall of 1936 I entered the Faculty of History at Moscow State University.

My university years occupy an extremely important place in my life. In general, they determined my future course. I joined a close-knit student collective that was rather homogeneous in terms of age and background, a good half of whose members were to perish prematurely in the Patriotic War of 1941–45. To this day, I maintain warm, close relations with a majority of those who survived and are still alive.

In the low, three-story building on Herzen Street that in those days housed the Faculty of History, a whole new, almost totally unknown world opened up before me. In contrast to the secondary school graduates of today, who have a definite, systematized grasp of all stages of the historical process, I and those of my generation were unfamiliar with entire divisions of world history—and exceedingly important ones, at that. For us, therefore, much of what we learned within the walls of our alma mater was a real revelation. This experience was heightened by the fact that our professors, with rare exception, were thoroughly versed in their fields and knew how to teach.

Still today I recall the brilliant lectures of P. F. Preobrazhenskii on the history of ancient Greece, and those of V. S. Sergeev on the history of ancient Rome. Somewhat drier in its presentation was the course given by E. A. Kosminskii, chairman of the department of medieval history. Yet his lectures possessed an invaluable virtue: order, logic, and consistency in the exposition of vast factual material. Since at that time there were no textbooks in medieval history available to students, the outlines of Professor Kosminskii’s lectures served as our basic text and study guide for exams. And there was M. V. Nechkina, who with great clarity constructed cogent lectures on Russian history.

Of great importance for the acquisition of professional skills were our seminar studies, which provided us with our first experience in independent work: the gathering and selection of materials for a research topic, the utilization and critical evaluation of different kinds of sources, the extraction and verification of information contained in the sources, and the formulation of one’s ideas into a reasoned argument. The preparation and discussion of reports by seminar members, under the direction of the instructor, were valuable training. In this sense, I was fortunate to study with professors who combined high academic qualifications with exceptional pedagogical skills.

I consider S. V. Bakhrushin my first teacher. He directed our practical training in Russian history. A prominent specialist on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Russia, a recognized authority on the history of Siberia, and the author of several essential works, he patiently and good-naturedly trained us in the fundamentals of the historian’s craft. I always think of Sergei Vladimirovich with a sense of deep gratitude. I also derived a great deal from the participation, in the spring semester of 1938, in the seminar on the history of the medieval city directed by V. V. Stoklitskaia-Tereshkovich. Ever sensitive to her students’ needs, Vera Veniaminovna would treat each one as an individual, taking into account his or her particular abilities and capabilities. She suggested that I translate sixteenth-century German chronicles, and the method of working with such sources proved exceedingly instructive.

Specialization began in our fourth year. That is, one had to choose a department and for the next two years listen to lectures, take seminars, pass examinations, prepare reports, and write course papers and a graduation thesis entirely in one’s chosen field of study. In my third year I settled on the history of the Middle Ages, which at the time seemed most promising to me, but later I abandoned my intention of becoming a medievalist. An earlier infatuation came back to evoke renewed passion in me.

At that time, the History Faculty’s curriculum included a course on the history of the colonial and dependent countries that covered the Orient and Latin America. The department of colonial and dependent countries occupied a special place in the Faculty. Its members, unlike their venerable, senior colleagues in other departments, were relatively young (not older, and sometimes considerably younger, than forty) and not so well known in university and scholarly circles. They were more open and easygoing, but more important, they introduced us to a field about which we had not the slightest concept beyond hearsay. At the same time, whereas in other fields courses were given by one or two professors who would concurrently discuss the international relations and historical development of various states, we heard about the history of the colonies and dependent countries from seven or eight lecturers, each of whom confined himself to a particular country or region.

Thus the history of India was the responsibility of the highly erudite, outwardly eccentric Orientalist, I. M. Reisner. The lively lectures of G. S. Kara-Murza on the history of China were, as a rule, delivered to a packed lecture hall filled not only with historians, but with students from other faculties, as well—mathematicians, physicists, chemists, biologists, and geographers. G. S. was killed in a plane crash during the liberation of Manchuria shortly before the end of the war with Japan. He was not yet forty.

The history of Turkey was taught by the always even-tempered, imperturbable A. F. Miller, while the witty and affable A. A. Guber dealt with the countries of Southeast Asia.

In the spring of 1939, the Latin American part of our course was presented by V. M. Miroshevskii, a talented researcher and one of the pioneers in the Soviet Union in the study of Latin America’s past. His absorbing lectures, which were subsequently included in a university textbook on the modern history of the colonial and dependent countries (published at the end of 1940), represented the first attempt by a Soviet scholar to systematize and survey the historical development of the Latin American countries. Indeed, it was probably under Vladimir Mikhailovich’s influence that I became a Latin Americanist. The colorful picture he painted of events so unlike any we had studied before, the original way in which he interwove social, political, economic, national, and regional contradictions, his vivid portraits and unforgettable descriptions of historical personalities all captivated me for their novelty and singularity. This was truly terra incognita. These were totally unfamiliar and thus particularly impressive pages of world history.

My previous notions about this distant continent had been taken largely from a number of literary works I had read on my own: Jack London’s The Mexican, the novels Hombre de oro, by Rufino Blanco-Fombona, and La vorágine, by José Eustasio Rivera, and the tales of B. Traven. But perhaps the greatest impression was made on me by the vivid stories of Ventura García Calderón, whose tight plots and exotic Peruvian setting struck my youthful imagination.

This, however, was artistic fancy. The actual historical facts that V. M. Miroshevskii related with such enthusiasm proved far more interesting. He spoke of those figures who evoked his sympathy with genuine fervor. V. M.’s favorite hero was Francisco de Miranda. This was so apparent that his students jokingly nicknamed him “Mirandoshevskii.” My concern with Latin America was also explained, in large measure, by the dramatic growth of interest in Spain produced by the civil war of 1936-39.

Thus, the die was cast. Having decided to specialize in Latin American history, during my final two years of university studies I took a special course with V. M. Miroshevskii on Spanish America’s war of independence and attended his lectures on the sources and historiography of the Latin American countries. By the spring of 1941, under V. M.’s guidance, I had completed my graduation thesis on the theme: “Mexico and the United States in the Years 1910-1918.” The department recommended me for postgraduate work to continue my research and prepare a dissertation on this topic. At the same time, my first publication on a Latin American subject appeared, a review of Henry Bamford Parkes’s A History of Mexico, which I wrote together with my friend A. B. Belen’kii.² Everything was turning out perfectly.

But fate had it otherwise. The outbreak of war on June 22, 1941, made it necessary to set my plans temporarily aside. As a soldier in the Soviet Army, I took part in battles around Moscow, in Latvia, Poland, and East Pomerania, and, finally, in the Battle of Berlin. I ended my wartime service on May 9, 1945, in Berlin, an army staff officer with the rank of captain. I was awarded the Order of the Patriotic War 2nd Class, two Red Stars, medals for Service in Combat, Victory over Germany, the Liberation of Warsaw, the Capture of Berlin, and others.

Only after my demobilization from the army was I able to renew the scholarly pursuits interrupted by the war. In November 1946, I was admitted to graduate study at the recently created Pacific Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences, which in principle was to combine the study of the Pacific Coast countries of Latin America with that of the Far East and Southeast Asia. I turned out to be practically the only Latin Americanist in this institute, however. My academic advisor was A. A. Guber (V. M. Miroshevskii was killed at the front in 1942), who already knew me well from Moscow University. For three years I worked on my dissertation, which dealt with United States policy toward the Mexican Revolution in the years 1913-17. I successfully defended it in October 1949 and received the Candidate of Historical Sciences degree. I subsequently published sections of the dissertation as separate articles.

My efforts to continue working on Latin American problems, however, encountered certain difficulties. In 1950, the Pacific Institute became a part of the Institute of Oriental Studies, which, given its focus, naturally had nothing to do with Latin America. Other scholarly institutions likewise concerned themselves scarcely at all with the region, at least from a historical perspective. In several institutions of higher learning where this specialty was offered, there were no vacancies.

All this induced me to accept an offer from the Ministry of Higher Education to take a teaching position at the Ryazan Pedagogical Institute, where I worked for five years, teaching mainly a course in modern history. I was able to work only sporadically on Latin America during this period. It did not form part of the Pedagogical Institute’s curriculum and there was too little time for research not related to my teaching responsibilities. Nonetheless, I have never regretted the years I spent in Ryazan, first, because I enjoy teaching and derive much satisfaction from it; and second, because teaching a general course over a period of several years proved quite useful, for it significantly broadened my horizons as a historian.

In the fall of 1954, I received an invitation to work in the Institute of History of the USSR Academy of Sciences, where within the Americas section a special Latin American group was being formed. For over a quarter of a century, now, my work has been uninterruptedly tied to this scholarly center of the Academy (renamed the Institute of World History and the Institute of the History of the USSR after a reorganization in 1968). Here, I was afforded the opportunity for further studies, while the Institute’s structure promoted research on Latin American problems in the context of the major events of world history. Of particular importance to me was the possibility to have contact and exchange ideas on a daily basis with such eminent scholars as my teacher A. A. Guber, the renowned Germanist A. S. Erusalimskii, the specialists in French history A. Z. Manfred and V. M. Dalin, the Americanists L. I. Zubok and N. N. Bolkhovitinov, my colleague and coauthor L. Yu. Slëzkin, and others.

Before continuing my story, I shall permit myself a brief digression, temporarily interrupting the main threads of my narrative.

Inasmuch as the direction and content of my work, together with my personal scholarly interests, were to a considerable degree shaped by the state of Latin American studies as a field, much turned on the level of development, the needs, and the goals of this field. In this connection, it should be remembered that the study of Latin American history is one of the youngest branches of Soviet scholarship. In prerevolutionary Russia, for all practical purposes, it had not been developed at all. Naturally, therefore, it does not have the same established scholarly traditions as Russian Oriental, medieval, and Byzantine studies, or the modern history of France, England, and other European states.

Shortly after the October Revolution of 1917, the Society for the Study of South America was created in Petrograd. Latin America became a relatively frequent topic of discussion in the press. A series of periodical publications carried diverse materials on the economic and political situation, the revolutionary struggle, the culture, and other facets of Latin American life. But the history of the Latin American countries did not immediately stand out as an independent discipline.

It was not until the late 1920s and early 1930s that the first such specialized works appeared, mostly studies of the history of social movements or studies of national and agrarian problems from a historical perspective. The mid-1980s marked a turn toward the concrete study of the most salient facts of Latin America’s civil history in their chronological succession (actually, this was limited for a number of years to the elaboration of isolated questions and lacked any planned, systematic character). The outbreak of the war, however, brought this process to a halt.

Significant advances by comparison with the preceding period became apparent only in the postwar years, but initially they were of little consequence. While the number of scholarly research establishments and institutions of higher learning concerned to one degree or another with Latin America increased somewhat, as did the number of specialists and the volume of publications (including historical literature), the quantity of published works was still not very great and subject matter remained exceedingly limited. The turning point, both in terms of the quantitative growth of scholarly publications and from the point of view of increased quality and an essential broadening of subject matter, came in the mid-1950s. It became especially noticeable in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This “turn” on the part of Soviet historians toward Latin America was occasioned by many circumstances.

One of the basic reasons lay in the development and demands of historical scholarship itself, which could not successfully fulfill its professional functions while ignoring the past of a whole continent where events had taken place that significantly influenced the fate of the world. Moreover, historians’ interest in Latin America was further aroused by the stormy revolutionary shocks and the sharp intensification of class and political struggle in this region.

Suffice it to recall that in the 1950s alone the Bolivian revolution occurred, the Guatemalan revolution was suppressed, the Vargas regime fell in Brazil, as did the Perón government in Argentina, dictatorships were overthrown in Colombia and Venezuela, and, finally, the Cuban Revolution was crowned with victory. Of fundamental importance, too, was the appearance in the postwar period of newly trained Latin Americanist scholars, a majority of whom had been students of V. M. Miroshevskii, A. A. Guber, and L. I. Zubok.

All these factors influenced the creation of favorable conditions, which, in the last quarter century, have made it possible for Soviet scholars to achieve certain successes in the study of Latin American history. During the second half of the 1950s and on through the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s, their work has acquired a more productive, regular, intensive, and purposeful nature and has more distinctly differentiated itself from the other fields of Latin American studies dealing with political, economic, geographic, juridical, philological, and other questions (although thematic boundaries are undoubtedly fluid, relative, and in many cases all but indistinguishable).

My task is neither to review nor to evaluate what has been done over several decades by Latin Americanist historians in the USSR. To do so would require a special treatment neither appropriate nor advisable in the present context. Moreover, I have frequently been called on to write about this and even the reader who knows no Russian can, if he wishes, familiarize himself with the appropriate publications in English and Spanish.³ Here, I shall deal only with a few aspects of the formation of Soviet Latin American studies insofar as they have affected my own work. In this regard, I feel that a major influence was above all the fact that, as noted above, in the Soviet Union the study of Latin American history started practically from zero, in conditions where achievements in the field were minimal.

At the same time, the scholarly manpower necessary to carry out a broad research program remained numerically small, despite some increase in the number of specialists. This situation did not essentially change even with the organization within the USSR Academy of Sciences of the Institute of Latin America (1961), for this institution, endowed with a large staff, is devoted exclusively to contemporary problems. Not without reason, Professor Cole Blasier, who has visited the Soviet Union more than once in recent years, writes in an extensive article on our Latin Americanists mainly about political scientists, sociologists, and economists, and only cursorily mentions historians, along with literary and art scholars, ethnographers, archaeologists, and geographers.⁴

Meanwhile, the demand in the USSR for literature on the most vivid pages of Latin American history is exceedingly great, not only from representatives of the scholarly world, but from fairly broad segments of society as well—students, teachers, schoolchildren, people engaged in home study, and others. This is particularly apparent in the situation that has developed on the book market. Thus, V. I. Gusev’s book on Simon Bolívar went through two editions of 200,000 and 300,000 copies respectively.⁵ The biography of Bolívar published by I. R. Lavretskii sustained three editions totalling almost 200,000 copies.⁶ These almost 700,000 copies, published over two decades, were bought up in a matter of days. The 200,000 copies (two editions) of V. A. Kuz’mishchev’s semipopular work on the rise and fall of Maya civilization sold out exceptionally quickly, as did the 100,000 copies of V. I. Guliaev’s essay on the state of the Olmec problem.⁷

Consequently, in order to fill the vacuum in Soviet historiography of Latin America there was a need for scholarly research, as well as for publications of a general educational and popular kind. All these factors led Soviet Latin Americanist historians to attach particular importance to the production of general works, collective and individual survey works covering the entire history of particular countries, collections of articles devoted to specific problems, university textbooks, and semipopular editions.

The author of these lines has himself made a significant contribution to the development of such works, although I have always considered monographic studies, which satisfy above all my own individual proclivities, to be the most important form of developing historical science. How, then, in daily practice does one combine these different, at times not very compatible, forms of scholarship?

During my first years at the Institute of History, I concentrated my efforts mainly on the study of the Mexican Revolution, begun already as a graduate student. My candidate’s dissertation and subsequent publications did not cover the full period of the Revolution, rather only one specific, albeit important, phase. In order to analyze the problem adequately, it was necessary to broaden the chronological scope of my research. I discussed this on numerous occasions with R. T. Rudenko, who had defended his dissertation on the United States position with respect to the Mexican Revolution in the years 1910-13 at almost the same time I defended my own. Thus was born the idea for a book, realized in 1958 with the appearance of our joint monograph, The Mexican Revolution of 1910—1917 and the Policy of the United States. A Spanish translation of this volume was published in Mexico soon after and there were several printings of the book.

I could, of course, hardly be indifferent to the fact that this work received recognition in the country where the events it describes had taken place. Jumping ahead, however, it must be recognized that I am now fully aware of its serious shortcomings: limited documentation, occasionally shallow analysis, and, in a number of instances, a simplistic, one-sided approach to the questions under investigation and an extraordinary rigidity of judgment.

As I examined different aspects of the Mexican Revolution, I became increasingly convinced of how deeply the roots of many occurrences of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries extended into the past. Influenced by these observations, in the latter half of the 1950s the scope of my scholarly interests broadened to include the independence period. At the same time, together with N. M. Lavrov, I directed the preparation of a collective work entitled Essays on the Modern and Contemporary History of Mexico (published in 1960), for which I wrote three chapters totalling more than 150 pages. In 1964, I published Mexico’s War of Independence, which I defended a year later as my doctoral dissertation and on the basis of which I was awarded the Doctor of Historical Sciences degree. In 1967, the Mexican publishing house Grijalbo brought out a Spanish-language edition of this book.

During the 1960s and 1970s, my work was extremely varied, reflecting the diverse tasks of the Institute and my own personal plans. It included editing historical sketches of Brazil and Chile, historiographical reviews, works on the colonial period, an analysis of Carlyle’s views on the revolutionary movement in Latin America, and articles on Mexico, Venezuela, and Guatemala in the Soviet Historical Encyclopedia. Together with L. Yu. Slëzkin, I published a manual for secondary teachers and two university textbooks. For me, however, my primary interest remained the war of independence in the Spanish colonies.

So as to clarify for myself the complicated course and interconnection of events, I compiled a short, popular outline history of this war (published as a separate book in 1971), and also studied the influence of the great French Revolution and the war of independence in North America on Spain’s American possessions, Miranda’s constitutional projects, and other related topics. My interest in Mexico was reflected in research I did on Hidalgo, Morelos, and Iturbide, while publication in 1979 of my Birth of the Mexican State allowed me to expand and correct some of the inaccuracies contained in the earlier, 1964 volume.

This work evolved at a time when Soviet and foreign Latin Americanist scholars were actively reexamining the independence movement of the first quarter of the nineteenth century in Latin America. As historians turned increasing attention to this topic, there was a growing awareness of the need to study the specific development of Paraguay in the years 1810–40 as an integral part of the multifaceted revolutionary process that spread over the subcontinent. This endeavor took concrete form in the mid-1960s, the first step being the “Paraguayan” chapters in the previously mentioned textbook, and the outline history, Spanish America in the Struggle for Independence, published in the early 1970s.

I was encouraged to continue the work I had begun by the positive response of specialists to my modest efforts. I was particularly inspired by the words of Professor Günter Kahle, of Cologne, who is exceedingly well versed on this subject. Noting that “it would hardly occur to another historian between Vladivostok and Lisbon, besides the two of us, to crown a book on the history of Spanish America’s war of independence with a chapter on Francia,” he goes on to write: “Any other historian would have chosen Bolívar or San Martín for this purpose, yet you have justified your choice so persuasively that its correctness cannot elicit the slightest doubt.”⁸

This work dragged on for a long time, however, due to the complexity of the topic itself, as well as the lack of many key materials requiring much time and effort to collect. And if in the end I was able to overcome these difficulties and to base my research on the necessary sources and literature, I am beholden for that not only to the staffs of Moscow’s libraries, but also to foreign colleagues whose friendly collaboration allowed me to secure a series of books, Xerox copies, and microfilms. I recall with particular warmth, in this regard, the late director of the Hispanic Foundation of the Library of Congress, in Washington, D.C., Howard F. Cline.

The results of my years of research on various aspects of the Francia dictatorship are summarized in my monograph, Revolution and Dictatorship in Paraguay (1975), and in a series of articles published in the USSR and abroad. Needless to say, it is not an author’s place to judge his own work. That is for his readers and reviewers to do. But if someone were nonetheless to ask me which of my works I like the most, without hesitation I would say this book on Paraguay. My preference is explained in part, perhaps, by the fact that, in trying to compensate for the lack of documents, which were unavailable to me from Paraguayan archives, I spent so much time and effort on this monograph. But then, what is “born of labor pangs,” like a child, is usually especially precious. All the same, I place this piece of research above the others, not in an unchecked rush of emotionalism, rather on the basis of objective criteria.

Without entering into particulars, I shall note only that, as it seems to me, this work’s comprehensive analysis of the Francia regime adds something new to our understanding of the essence of a complex and contradictory phenomenon that defies simplistic appraisal; it demonstrates the erroneousness of a number of traditional views; and it permits sounder conclusions about the preconditions, nature, and historical place of the Paraguayan dictatorship. Adding to this, the book’s critical review of the relevant historiography makes it possible to trace the repeated formulation of distorted, tendentious interpretations of the “Supreme Dictators” activities.

I also feel that this was a timely monograph. In the 1970s, against the backdrop of a growing interest in Latin American dictators past and present, the Francia regime began to attract attention both in the scholarly literature and in fiction. I recall that in the period from 1974 to 1979 alone, four books appeared in different countries of America (not including lesser publications) that dealt with this theme either in whole or in large part.⁹ I would be pleased if my own modest work were to occupy a place in this literature. I am hopeful that the forthcoming Spanish translation, to be published by Casa de las Américas, in Havana, will make it available to a wider circle of readers.

Now, a word about my plans for the immediate future. Since the late 1970s, I have been concerned mainly with studying the position of Imperial Russia with regard to the Spanish colonies in America during the final four decades of the eighteenth century. I am interested, above all, in problems relating to the conflicting interests of Russia, Spain, and, in part, England in the American Northwest—Russian and Spanish expeditions of that period, the Nootka Sound controversy, and so forth. Francisco de Miranda’s ties to the government of Catherine II and tsarist diplomacy during and following his sojourn in Russia (1786-87) likewise deserve attention, as do a number of other questions.

This important subject has so far been only partially treated in broader works on the history of Russo—Latin American and Russo-Spanish relations.¹⁰ Moreover, the authors of these valuable works were not able to use the rich holdings of Soviet archives pertaining to this topic. There is thus a need, in my view, for a special study of the topic, a study that promises interesting results.

In addition to this research, much time will be taken up with the preparation of publications planned by the Institute of World History, editing and reviewing manuscripts, advising graduate students, and also by my responsibilities as a member of the governing council of the USSR-Mexico Friendship Society.

Considering all this, I expect to complete my work on the theme “Russia and Spanish America in the Last Third of the Eighteenth Century” by the mid-1980s. One must not forget, however, that the achievement of such an undertaking, especially after a certain age, does not depend solely on one’s wishes, but also on his ability to see it through. Accordingly, I attach great importance to a rational expenditure of my energies and to a sensible balancing of work and relaxation. Unfortunately, this is not always possible, but in the course of the current decade I shall do my best to fulfill this difficult task.

To conclude, I want to share some thoughts on the study of Latin American history in the immediate future. Because this restless region is today attracting special attention, Latin American studies are now experiencing a kind of “boom”—primarily as a result of researchers addressing “burning” issues of the day. The notable growth of interest in these problems is perfectly understandable. But I fear that the judgments, conclusions, and prognoses of the political scientists and the economists, however authoritative, original, and flashy they may sound, run the risk of remaining suspended in mid-air if they do not take duly into account the regularities and peculiarities of historical evolution brought to light by the appropriate specialists.

Hence, in my view, there is a need to promote further the efforts of Latin Americanist historians. In this connection, one could suggest numerous issues, but I shall limit myself to two: research methods and subject matter.

It goes without saying that work on any given topic can proceed by the most diverse means. In the complex process of seeking and ascertaining the historical truth, however, the primary and decisive role must, from my point of view, be played in the foreseeable future, as in the past, by monographic research based on a profound and comprehensive analysis of the sources and literature.

At the same time, the practice of scholarly debates on specific problems (broad or narrow) seems useful and productive where discussion can be structured around a regional, thematic, or any other organizing principle. Such a method has been successfully employed more than once at meetings of European Latin Americanist historians, at conferences of United States and Mexican historians, and during discussions periodically conducted by the editorial board of the Moscow journal, Latinskaia Amerika. It might be well to consider a wider use of these discussions on both a national and international scale.

As for the contents of our works, there of course exists a mass of potential topics that await their researcher, and even if some of them have already been thoroughly studied, it is always possible to come back to them and draw on new, previously unknown materials or to examine a problem from a different perspective. But primary attention, it seems to me, should be given to problems that have been less studied. Among others, for example, I would mention the respective peculiarities of the Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Dutch colonization of America, centralism and federalism, separatist and integrationist tendencies during and immediately following the wars of independence in the first quarter of the past century, the preconditions and causes of the disintegration of Gran Colombia, the United Provinces of the River Plate, and the Central American Federation, and the social nature of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin American dictatorships.

The list could probably be continued, but I have no doubt that any of my esteemed colleagues who so desires will easily complete it himself—or will substitute an entirely different one according to his own judgment. It remains only for me to end with the traditional conclusion: feci quod potui, faciant meliora potentes.

Bibliography of the Basic Works of M. S. Al’perovich (1941-81)

Russian-language titles cited more than once: Bol’shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia [Great Soviet Encyclopedia]; Diplomaticheskii slovar’ [Diplomatic dictionary]; Istorik-marksist [Marxist historian]; Latinskaia Amerika [Latin America]; Novaia i noveishaia istoriia [Modern and recent history]; Sovetskaia istoricheskaia entsiklopediia [Soviet historical encyclopedia]; Sovetskaia etnografiia [Soviet ethnography]; Voprosy istorii [Problems of history].

Author notes