The Impossible Triangle: Mexico, Soviet Russia and the United States in the 1920s by Daniela s> Spenser (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 36I This is an important piece of research, drawing upon a wide range of archives in Russia and Finland, and setting what happened in Karelia very well within the overall Soviet context. Using the evidence of lists of those condemned in the terrorand population figures,Kangaspuro concludes that, although all nationalities in Karelia suffered, the Finns seem to have been singled out, and that thisjustifiesthe use of the term 'ethnic cleansing'. Other studies of Finnish migrantsto Soviet Karelia either legally, from the USA and Canada, or illegally, across the frontier paint a similartragic picture. Kangaspuro's book is however much more than the sad story of outsiders whose hopes and illusionswere cruellydashed. It is a valuable contributionto the new historyof the Soviet Union that is beginning to emerge, and as such deservesa widerreadership.One can only hope that a translationinto English might be forthcoming. SchoolofSlavonicandEast EuropeanStudies DAVID KIRBY UJniversity College London Spenser,Daniela. TheImpossible Triangle. Mexico, Soviet RussiaandtheUnited States in theI920s. Forewordby FriedrichKatz. American Encounters/Global Interactions. Duke University Press, Durham, NC, and London, I999. xiv + 254 pp. Notes. Bibliography.Index. [34.00; 1I I-95THEMexican was the only major twentieth-centuryrevolution to establisha radicalregime priorto that of the Bolsheviksand, survivingin some formuntil the electoral defeat of the PRI in 2000, can be said to have outlived it by a further nine years. The comparison of the two was one that has fascinated many. The peasant leader Emiliano Zapata declaredthat the cause of Mexico represented, along with that of Russia, 'the cause of humanity, the supreme interestof all the oppressed'(p. 98). The Bolsheviksbelieved thatthe Mexican revolution could act as a bridgehead, as much northwards,towardsthe USA, as towardsthe Caribbean and CentralAmerica. Yetthe differenceswere alsothere.Bolsheviktheoriststended to be sceptical of the achievements of the Mexican revolution and to encourage further change within the country. Mexican politicians and thinkers were at first intrigued by the Bolshevik experience, but, as the I9205 wore on, became more and more critical.The fact that the Mexican revolutionhad involved to a considerable degree that class whom the Bolsheviksheld in such contempt, the peasantry, was one underlying source of difference. In 1924 President Calles, while recognizing that both revolutionswere an expression of human development, also warned of the need to control the destructive potential within every revolution. By the late 1920S opinion in Mexico seemed to be overwhelminglycriticalof the human cost of Stalin'schanges. Paradoxically, it was this distastefor the course of the Soviet regime, one made all the more poignant by the very shared ideals and experiences of the two countries, that was to lead PresidentCardenas to grant asylum to the most noted foe of that dictatorship,Leon Trotsky. The historyof thisrelationshipiswell told in the studyby Daniela Spenser,a fellow at the Centro de Investigacionesy EstudiosSuperioresen Antropologia 362 SEER, 8o, 2, 2002 Social in Mexico City. She has drawn on a wide range of sources, from the Mexican press and documents of the time, US materials, through to Comintern archives, intelligence materials and memoirs. As the title of the book suggests, there were always three partners:whatever Mexico and the USSR may have wanted to do, the USA was a major factor, as much in the way in which many Americans tended to see a Bolshevikthreat coming from Mexico, whether or not it did, as in the degree to which Mexican foreign policy was throughout the I920S dominated by the difficultrelationshipwith the USA. The US press, sections of US business and some parts of the US statewere alarmedby the Mexican-Bolsheviklink. The core of the story is that of diplomatic relations between the two countries, initiated in 1924 and terminated, by Mexico, in 1930. The second ambassadorwas Alexandra Kollontai (1926-27). These diplomatic relations were, however, conducted against the background of more extensive interaction : several prominent Comintern figures, among them Sen Katayama, M. N. Roy and BertramWolfewere active in Mexico. Some tradesunion and peasant forces in Mexico looked to Moscow for support. Soviet government and Comintern analysiswas itselfsubjectto sharpswings,in part as a resultof attempts to fit Mexico into some broader global analytic frameworkof the moment: thus in the early 1920S Soviet theorists doubted the ability of the Mexican state, within an overall Leninist...