William Richardson’s thoughtful analysis of Russian views of Mexican society begins with an examination of first-hand accounts by individuals interested in economic expansion in California in the early nineteenth century. These writers generally felt that the area needed a more vital government, and depicted it as a potential garden spot in contrast to the Spanish perspective of it as a desolate frontier. The Russians found points of historical commonality between their nation and Mexico. Both suffered at the hands of conquerors, each ruled over a vast Christian territory, and feudalism and the encomienda had similar characteristics. Latter-day writers noted that Benito Juárez’s reforms approximated those of Alexander II, and that each country experienced a major upheaval in the second decade of the twentieth century.
According to Richardson, the early Russian writers often lacked perspicacity and knowledge of Mexico. However, he mentions five writers who provided valuable descriptions of Mexico during the Porfiriato when Russian liberals searched for an idealized republican form of government in Mexico. Geographer S. K. Patkanov filtered Mexican social and cultural life through a Russian prism, and reacted against the lack of understanding between the wealthy landed and the exploited peasants. Journalist S. D. Protopopov used Mexico as a vehicle to describe Russia, as he urged his countrymen to reject political repression and chided the church for retarding free thought. G. A. Wollant examined life in Mexico City. Poet Konstantin Balmont tied Mexico to Russia through the omnipresence of blood, and translated the Popul Vuh into Russian. P. A. Tverskoi castigated the Díaz government for fiscal corruption, electoral fraud, and lack of compassion for the poor, yet hoped that Díaz would take his hints and initiate changes.
Deeper critical analyses of Mexico by Russians appeared after the October Revolution. Mexico recognized the U.S.S.R. in 1924. Artists Diego Rivera and David Siqueiros visited the Soviet Union and praised its accomplishments. The first Soviet ambassador to Mexico, S. S. Pestkovsky, wrote a book that examined Mexico’s revolution from a historical materialist point of view, and a second volume that presented a sophisticated Marxist critique of the Mexican peasants’ struggle for land and liberty. Pestkovsky declared that the 1857 liberal movement destroyed feudalism and served as the bourgeois stage of revolution, claimed that the Porfiriato engendered social conflict that enhanced conditions for workers to take control of their political destiny; blamed the failure of the 1910 revolution on the lack of worker-peasant unity; and labeled Mexico a dependent, semicolonial state. Vladimir Mayakovsky portrayed the popular spirit of Mexico in the mid-1920s, and contended that Mexican insurrectionaries overthrew the old order but failed to develop the ideology and program of a revolution. Feminist author Alexandra Kollantai, ambassador to Mexico in 1926 and 1927, sketched the workers’ struggle there, noted the abuses of native and foreign capitalists and the need for land reform, and wistfully thought that Mexico was moving to the left.
Filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, hoping to recapture the revolutionary spirit of 1917, traveled to Mexico in the 1930s. Fascinated by the duality of Mexican Christianity, the belief of the average person and the evil of the church’s dogma and hierarchy, he incorporated religious metaphors into the powerful film Que Viva México that showed Mexicans living on decidedly different levels of social and cultural development. Richardson indicates that Leon Trotsky, who resided in Mexico from 1937 to 1940, for the most part adhered to his promise not to meddle in Mexican politics. Trotsky assailed state capitalism with huge doses of foreign investment as unworkable in the poor nation, and claimed that the authoritarianism of Mexico’s Stalinists prepared the country for fascism.
This well-organized, clearly written book, the product of archival research in the Soviet Union, provides interesting insights into Russian introspection and attitudes about Mexico. The author handles politically charged materials judiciously and offends none of the numerous political factions he treats, except the Trotskyists, whom he refers to as Trotskyites—a term they find highly pejorative.
