Revolutionary Party Research Articles

The Socialist Revolutionary Party, Ukraine, and Russian National Identity in the 1920s

During the late 1920s Victor Chernov and some other Socialist Revolutionaries (SR) in the emigration broke sharply with traditional SR thinking on the nationalities question. Chernov (1876-1952), one of Russia's most well known revolutionaries, had been a founder of the SR party in 1902 and was considered its leader and chief theoretician. He had been minister of agriculture in the Provisional Government and elected chair of the Constituent Assembly when it met in January 1918. After the assembly was dissolved he participated in anti-Bolshevik socialist governments in the Volga region and Siberia, but had to leave Russia in 1920. He had very difficult relations with the SRs in Paris and kept his legitimacy as leader through his membership of the Foreign Delegation and his control of the larger Prague SR group.1 When this group split in 1927, he formed a breakaway group, which he insisted represented the SR party abroad. This split is usually ascribed to emigre factionalism, but the cause was an issue of profound importance to the SRs. In 1926 Chernov had created the Socialist League of a New East (Sotsialisticheskaia Liga Novogo Vostoka), which called for the break-up of the USSR into independent nation-states, including a Russian one. This proposal was so unacceptable to fellow SRs that adherence to the Socialist League was considered incompatible with party membership.2 The position the Socialist League adopted on Ukrainian independence was one of the primary reasons that other SRs rejected it. This article describes the attitude of Russian SRs toward Ukraine and the Ukrainian SRs. The Socialist League was largely a project between Russian and Ukrainian SRs. It claimed that the Bolshevik regime was a colonial one and a national oppressor of the other Soviet Republics.3 The idea that Ukraine had a colonial relationship to Russia was utterly unacceptable to the majority of SRs, as was the idea that Ukrainian separatism was a radical and progressive movement.

Evolution of Mexico and Other Single-Party States

Editor's Note : Mexico is one of the most—if not “the most”—important country in terms of its daily impact on the lives of US citizens. Trade, investment, energy, narcotics, security, pollution, tourism, academic exchanges, crime, legal and illegal migration, family ties, cuisine, media attention, and political campaigns (in both countries) are among the factors that enhance the salience of our “southern neighbor” to the well-being of America and Americans. Not only does the 2,000-mile long US-Mexican border constitute the world's longest frontier between a developed and a developing nation, but Mexico's highly porous, violence-ridden, corruption-infested 755-mile interface with Guatemala and Belize constitutes a virtual “Third US Border” through which hundreds of thousands of people pass annually en route to the United States ( Grayson 2006 ). Twenty years ago it was said that “democracy exists 364days a year in Mexico—it's only absent on Election Day.” Giving credence to Mexico's status as “the perfect dictatorship” 1 was the government's blatant manipulation of the 1988 presidential contest on behalf of Carlos Salinas de Gortari, candidate of the Tammany-Hall-like Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) over Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, PRI apostate and nominee of the center-leftist front that evolved into the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD). The standard-bearer of the center-right National Action Party (PAN) finished third. Mexico's significance to the US accounts, in part at least, for the jubilation expressed by pundits, politicians, and political scientists to the mid-2000 victory of the PAN's Vicente Fox Quesada over PRI and PRD competitors, an apparent affirmation that the ancient Aztec nation was surfing on the “third wave of democracy” ( Huntington 1991 ). Known as the “Marlboro Man” because of his 6-foot-5-inch height and craggy good looks, the PAN competitor trumpeted the imperative of change during his campaign, castigating the hapless PRI candidate for the nation's real and imagined ills. …

Laos: Politics in a Single-party State

In the nominally Marxist-Leninist Lao People's Democratic Republic (LPDR), whose political institutions are modelled on those of the former Soviet Union, the most important events of the political calendar are the congresses of the ruling Lao People's Revolutionary Party (LPRP). These congresses take place only every five years, and 2006 was such a year. Party congresses provide opportunities both for the nomination of a new political leadership, and for setting out new policy directions. Thus it was the Fourth Party Congress in 1986 that endorsed the so-called “new economic mechanism”, which introduced a market economy and opened the way for private foreign investment. The Fourth Congress was delayed for nine months while the ideological struggle over policy was waged, with great secrecy, within the Party. That subsequent congresses have been held on schedule (some time in March) suggests a degree of ideological consensus. The 2006 Eighth Party Congress was held on schedule. What party congresses do determine is the leadership of the country for the next five years, so they are preceded by a period of intense political activity. And because of the excessive secrecy that surrounds all intra-party politics in Laos, the lead-up to a party congress is a time of swirling rumour. For a good two years prior to the 2006 congress rumours abounded about the likely composition of the new Political Bureau, and who would get what position in the new government that is formed after each congress. In the lead-up to the Eighth Party Congress there was little serious debate over policy. Some observers claimed to discern differences between “reformers” and “conservatives”, or between “pro-Vietnamese” and “pro-Chinese” groupings within the Party, but there was widespread agreement over key policy issues. These were, broadly, that the country should continue to pursue an open market economy and to attract foreign direct investment to develop industry and resources; that it should continue to accept foreign aid from all willing donors;

Los buenos, los malos y los feos: Poder y resistencia en América Latina

This collection contains 21 articles plus an introduction, divided into sections titled “To Resist in Order to Conquer,” “Memory and Discourses,” “Ethnicity and Identity,” and “Repression, Revolution, and Everyday Resistance.” Five of the articles are in English, and the remainder are in Spanish. Curiously enough, quotations from English-language works appearing in a Spanish-language article have been left in English, suggesting that the ideal audience is literate in both languages. While Los buenos, los malos y los feos provides overall broad geographical coverage — including articles on Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina, and Bolivia — ten articles (almost half) deal with Mexico. Two-thirds of the contributors self-identify as historians, with the remainder made up of anthropologists and sociologists. Finally, the contributions cover an enormous temporal range, from the Spanish Conquest to the 1990s.An introduction to an edited collection — particularly one as large as this one — should provide a road map that will help the reader navigate and select a route to best connect the authors’ many points. Unfortunately, the introduction to Los buenos, los malos y los feos fails badly in this regard. While the editors do summarize the articles and tie them to a series of general themes concerning the forms, ambiguities, and contradictory outcomes of resistance through the ages in Latin America, they neither discuss the articles in order of their appearance nor explain the rationale for book’s four-part organization. This reviewer would have appreciated individual introductions to each of the four sections, as well as a greater effort on the part of the editors to pull the work together.That said, the weakness of the collection may also be one of its strengths. Since the development of subaltern studies and the popular work of James Scott and others, “resistance” has become an exceedingly overused term, applicable to just about any counterdiscourse or individual or collective act opposing a status quo. Through multiple case studies, Los buenos, los malos y los feos both illustrates and offers an implicit criticism of the current state of “resistance studies.” A number of articles show that what passes publicly for resistance is thoroughly penetrated by power. For instance, Miriam Lang concludes her article on the feminist movement by noting that while middle-class feminists in Mexico “are increasingly accepted as individuals and subjects with legal rights, the clients of feminist NGOs from the lower classes are trained to offer free services to their families and communities.” Neither form of “empowerment” threatens hegemonic neoliberalism (p. 54). Likewise, Marta Zapata argues that during the long period of corporativist and clientalistic politics, Mexican intellectuals sought to transform society in progressive ways by working closely with high-ranking officials of the postrevolutionary state. Only with the economic crisis and the crisis of legitimacy of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) have they begun to distance themselves from officialdom. Finally, working in Brazil, Sérgio Costa interrogates the limits of both “egalitarian antiracism” — which subordinates cultural to social integration — and culturally oriented “integrationist anti-racism,” which pays scant attention to the articulation of race and class. He concludes that “antiracism needs to strive for the construction of equality of opportunities and attend to cultural particularities” (pp. 384 – 85).Other authors examine the cultural inscription of resistance in specific times and places — in, for example, Ingrid Kummels’s discussion of Ráramuri (Tarahumara) ritual peyote consumption or Stephan Scheuzger’s analysis of hybrid political discourse among the Worker, Peasant, Student Coalition of the Isthmus (COCEI) that has played an important role among peoples from Juchitán and other southern Zapotec communities. Much of the substantial literature on the COCEI is informed by ethnopopulist approaches; by contrast, Scheuzger documents the polyvalent character of COCEI politics — built on a discourse that appeals simultaneously to ethnic, local, and class interests — and the way that representations shift with changes in political power fields. He believes that “the efficacy of COCEI resistance originates less from its rootedness in a cultural soil, as from the COCEI’s ability to manage multiple hybrid forms of resistance” (p. 329).The preceding comments touch on a few of the many themes and articles contained in the volume; limits of space prohibit a more thorough discussion. I do not think that the collection breaks new ground, but overall the authors exhibit fine-grained, empirically based, and theoretically sophisticated approaches to the analysis of domination and resistance. For this reason alone, Los buenos, los malos y los feos should find a reading public. It would be particularly useful for courses in history, sociology, or anthropology.

Newsrooms in conflict: journalism and the democratization of Mexico

Hughes, Sallie. Newsrooms in Conflict: Journalism and the Democratization of Mexico. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006. 286 pp. $24.95. Do you know who Carlos Slim is? Most people do not. A Mexico City-based telecommunications tycoon, he has been recognized recently as the world's richest man. Besides that, Sallie Hughes, an assistant professor at the University of Miami, suggests that this multi-billionaire has the potential to reverse the growing democratization of Mexican journalism. But this dire possibility is not the focus of her meticulously researched book, Newsrooms in Conflict: Journalism and the Democratization of Mexico, which chronicles how Mexico's traditionally authoritarian media system became democratized. From 1980 until the 2006 presidential election, the country's newsrooms evolved into what Hughes calls a hybrid system consisting of three models of journalism. She calls the model that she is most interested in civic-oriented journalism. It should not be confused with what is referred to as civic journalism in the United States. Some civic-oriented newspapers, such as Siglo 21 (Century 21), are new, but others, such as Mexico City's oldest newspaper, El Universal, have been on the scene for a long time. Hughes says Mexico's civic newsrooms were assertive, covered a diversity of political opinions, and were autonomous from the government by the mid-1990s. They took on the functions of watchdog and advocate for their readers and gave voice to opponents of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party or PRI), the political party that controlled Mexico for more than seventy years. Civic-oriented newspapers ultimately became part of the reason PRI finally crumbled and lost control. The press system's other new model, represented by the networks and many major newspapers, is what Hughes calls the market-driven model. It also played a part in PRI's downfall, not for ultraistic reasons but because of its profit-driven attempts to respond to what the market demanded. The final model that she identified is the inertial and adaptive authoritarian model, which is either imposed from above or by journalists who support the regime. It lacks newsroom autonomy and has a passive approach to newsgathering. Hughes has an intimate knowledge of Mexican media, having worked as a journalist there for twelve years, but she brings more to her research than observation, networking, and familiarity. Her impressive, well-researched analysis of Mexico's press system includes an interesting combination of sociology, ethnography, content analysis, interviews with editors, and surveys of journalists. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the following topics: journalism in Mexico and other Latin America countries; the connection between politics and the media; the role of the press as a watchdog and/or advocate; and the fragile situation of media in countries that experience swings between democracy and authoritarianism. …

The Combined Effect of Advertising and News Coverage in the Mexican Presidential Campaign of 2000

In July 2000, the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) lost the presidency of Mexico after 71 years of continuous rule. Research based on individual data obtained with surveys shows that important media effects occurred. Using aggregate data, in this article the author explores the effects of political advertising and media coverage on preferences during the Mexican presidential campaign. Data on voter preferences are taken from results of a trial ballot question in public opinion polls. Data on advertising are measured in gross rating points. Data on media coverage are taken from the monitoring of newscasts on the two major networks. OLS regression models are developed, with preferences as the dependent variable and campaigning differentials as the independent variables. Based on aggregate data, this research shows that in Mexico's 2000 presidential campaign, exposure to political communication led to persuasion, and news appears to have been more important than ads. Political communication was a unified process where ads and news presence acted together in a very interesting fashion, “bounding” each other in periods of major changes in preferences but with news effects prevailing over ads. Qualified news differentials accounted for 20% of the variance in preferences, and ad differentials accounted for 8%. This media effect occurred through a cumulative process where ads and news coverage acted together.

The 2006 Mexican Election and Its Aftermath: Editor's Introduction

Competition came to Mexico's new democracy with unexpected fury in the nation's 2006 presidential election. Until recently Mexico was the bastion of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), where opposition parties could rarely hope to gain half as many votes as the PRI. But in the July 2 presidential election, Felipe Calderón of the National Action Party (PAN) edged Ándres Manuel López Obrador of the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) by a mere 233,831 votes, or 0.58% of the more than 41.5 million cast. The PRI's candidate, Roberto Madrazo, finished a distant third. Calderón took this razor-thin margin after a fiercely competitive campaign marked by lavish media spending and the use of negative attack ads. López Obrador has contested the outcome from the time the polls closed until the present, calling his supporters into the streets on several occasions to put pressure on the electoral authorities to recount the votes; staging an “election by acclamation” in which those present at a rally on Mexico's Independence Day “elected” López Obrador by a show of hands; and holding an “inauguration” ceremony on November 20, the anniversary of the onset of the Mexican Revolution. While López Obrador challenged the preliminary outcome, Calderón had to wait patiently until the Federal Electoral Tribunal (TRIFE) declared him elected on September 5, fully two months after the ballots had been cast.

The Revival of the Inner Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party in 1945 and its Historical Significance

The Revival of the Inner Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party in 1945 and its Historical Significance

The 2006 Mexican Elections: Manifestation of a Divided Society?

When the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) lost the presidency in 2000, the central cleavage that defined Mexican politics in the last 15 years of the twentieth century—pro-regime vs. anti-regime—could no longer guide voters on Election Day. With no PRI to vote out of office (or to defend), Mexicans were impelled to turn their political attention to non-regime issues, such as economic policy, social policy, relations with the United States, and crime control. As Kathleen Bruhn and Kenneth Greene make clear in their contribution to this symposium, Mexican political elites are seriously divided on these issues, while the views of their bases are not far apart.

The PRI's 2006 Electoral Debacle

This short article outlines why the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which governed Mexico for the final 71 years of the twentieth century, not only lost the 2006 presidential election, but posted a miserable third place finish by taking only 22.7% of the national vote versus 36.7% for the winner, Felipe Calderón of the center-right National Action Party (PAN) and 36.1% for the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). It also explains why, despite its recent electoral results, the once-hegemonic party will continue to play an important, but reduced political role: as a coalition partner with the governing PAN to create majorities in both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate.

Perils of Pankratova: Some Stories from the Annals of Soviet Historiography (review)

Reviewed by: Perils of Pankratova: Some Stories from the Annals of Soviet Historiography Steve Smith Reginald E. Zelnik , Perils of Pankratova: Some Stories from the Annals of Soviet Historiography. Contributions by Laura Engelstein, David A. Hollinger, Benjamin Nathans, Yuri Slezkine, and Glennys Young . xiv + 137 pp. Published by the Herbert J. Ellison Center for Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies, University of Washington. Distribution Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005. ISBN 0295985208 (paper). $12.95. For decades the four-volume documentary collection Rabochee dvizhenie v Rossii v XIX veke (The Worker's Movement in 19th-Century Russia [Moscow, 1950–55]) sat on Reginald Zelnik's desk in Berkeley. It is typical of the man that his curiosity about its editor, Anna Mikhailovna Pankratova (1897–1957), should have been piqued. Many scholars would barely have registered the name of the editor of such a collection, still less have felt interest in his or her life and personality. It is to the credit of Reggie, who is so sorely missed by colleagues around the world since his untimely death in 2004, that this, his posthumous and incomplete work, was inspired by a desire to learn more about the "troubled yet in its own way creative life" of the woman whose name leapt daily across his desk or out of his footnotes. Pankratova was far more than the general editor of major Soviet collections of documentary material, although she did much work of that nature: she was also the foremost historian of Russian labor in the Stalin era. She grew up in a poor working-class family in Odessa, losing her father when she was 9 years old and starting work at the age of 14. During the Civil War, she threw herself into defending the revolution, working in the underground in Odessa, initially as a member of the Socialist Revolutionary (SR) Party. From the first, scholarship and political commitment were inseparable for her. With Soviet power secure, she embarked on professional training as a historian at the Institute of Red Professors, from which she graduated in 1925. Thanks to the patronage of M. N. Pokrovskii, who headed the institute's history faculty, she rapidly established herself as a scholar and an academic bureaucrat. Few careers proceeded smoothly under Stalin, and Pankratova's was no exception. Despite several close scrapes in which her ideological rectitude was challenged, she remained a touchstone of loyalty to the Stalinist regime. It was only after the death of Stalin, however, that her career took off. Having become a member of the Central Committee in 1952, under Khrushchev she was granted the Order of Lenin and full membership in the Academy of Sciences. The years [End Page 885] of the "Thaw" were her most creative period: as editor-in-chief of Voprosy istorii from May 1953, she piloted that journal in an anti-Stalinist direction, meeting resistance that eventually in 1957 forced her to retire because of ill health. She died that year, barely 60 years of age. As Yuri Slezkine notes in his brilliant overview of Reggie's scholarly work, Pankratova worked on "many of the themes and subjects that preoccupied him throughout his life" (3). The radical difference between them, of course, lay in the utterly different historical conditions in which they worked: she in a climate of severe political repression and ideological dogmatism; he in the free-wheeling academy of the West Coast. It is this difference in circumstances that apparently spurred Reggie's historical curiosity. Many—I include myself—might dismiss Pankratova as basically a Stalinist hack. But to rush to judgment in this way was contrary to Reggie's temperament, allergic as he was to knee-jerk reaction, simplistic analysis, or conventional wisdom. It is a tribute to his enormous gifts as a historian, as well as to his profound humanity, that in this little book he shows not only how unfair but also how unhistorical such instant dismissal is. Certainly, as he concedes, evidence for her "opportunism, her partiinost´, her sacrifice of scholarly for organizational achievement, her naïveté about breakthroughs in the old ways of the Party" can easily be found. Yet with insight and empathy, he seeks to show...

From ‘feckless pluralism’ to ‘dominant power politics’? The transformation of Russia's party system

The transformation of Russia's party system demonstrates a trend towards a decrease in party competition since the establishment of the party of power, United Russia, which claims to have become the dominant party. These developments are unique among post-Soviet countries, which merely attempted to create personalist, rather than party-based, monopolies of ruling elites. Why have Russia's elites opted to build a party-based monopoly and what are the prospects of this enterprise? The formation of the ruling group's party-based monopoly is explained with the help of a part-contingent model of an interrelated chain of causes and effects: (1) open electoral conflict among elites; (2) forced instrumental use of political parties as tools by the elites, in this conflict; (3) elite conflict turned into a zero-sum game; (4) a set of incentives for the ruling elite to make further instrumental use of the party of power; (5) an effective constellation of ideological and organizational resources of the party of power. The article also analyses the benefits and risks of the dominance of the party of power and its possible role in the consolidation of a non-democratic regime in Russia, along lines comparable to the Institutional Revolutionary Party in Mexico.

Dictatorship, society, and genocide in Argentina: repression in Rosario, 1976–19831

Throughout the decade of 1970 the Latin American Southern Cone was the setting for the bloodiest military dictatorship the region experienced.2 It was marked, as they all were, by far-reaching repr...

LAOS: The State of the State

The year 2005 marked the 35th anniversary of the People's Revolutionary Party's takeover of the Laotian government. Throughout this period, journalists and scholars have used various labels to describe the Laotian state. Some referred to it as a communist or socialist authoritarian state while others have described it as a weak state that could not even pay the salaries of many of its employees regularly. It is true that Laos is one of the five remaining communist countries in the world. It is also true that the Lao People's Revolutionary Party (LPRP) does not tolerate any form of political opposition that directly or indirectly challenges its rule. Laos remains one of the most underdeveloped and poorest countries in the world. Even in 2005, about 38 per cent of the population reportedly lived below the poverty line and the salary of senior government officials was not enough for a family of four to live decently. Furthermore, a large majority of the working people, especially those from minority areas, do not have any formal education.

The Myth of José Martí: Conflicting Nationalism in Early Twentieth-Century Cuba

Since the mid-1990s, several scholars of Cuban history, including Aline Helg, Alejandro de la Fuente, Louis Pérez, Antoni Kapcia, K. Lynn Stoner, and Kirwin Shaffer, have explored the complex and frequently conflicting dynamics that shaped the island’s political system and identity in the decades immediately following independence from Spain in 1898. Issues surrounding race and working-class conflicts have been at the center of much of this new research, especially as historians try to sort out what these conflicts say about evolving notions of what it meant to be Cuban. Lillian Guerra’s The Myth of José Martí is one of the latest books to explore these issues. What makes the book unique is how she couches the postindependence disputes surrounding Cuban nationalism within the framework of Martían mythology. By using an array of Cuban archival, newspaper, and published sources, Guerra illustrates how different groups invoked Martí and their vision of what he (and thus Cuban independence) meant in order to justify their agendas and their actions both during the war of 1895 – 98 and in the first two decades after independence.Guerra begins with an overview of Martí’s attempts to unify the revolutionary movement in the early 1890s. She portrays Martí as promoting unity above all else in order to gather support. Reading this chapter, one is led to believe that Martí had few firm ideas about what an independent Cuba should look like, because he was too busy burying such a specific agenda in order to bring as many Cubans on board to his Cuban Revolutionary Party as he could. Guerra then shows how different nationalist groups during the war (especially after Martí’s death in battle in 1895) quickly maneuvered to promote their own agendas. In essence, Martí’s PRC had no agenda for postwar Cuba — thanks in part to Martí, who had to balance competing interests that often differed over matters of race and class. This balancing act would serve as the basis for a myth of preindependence social unity; yet, at the same time this balancing became what Guerra labels “the Achilles’ heel of the Cuban revolutionary movement” (p. 45), as it undermined any agreed-upon nationalist agenda after 1898.Guerra divides the major players of Cuban political life according to three types of nationalist vision: “pro-imperialist nationalists” (those primarily from the upper classes and who had friendly relations with the United States), “revolutionary nationalists” (those mostly from the middle classes who sought a strong state that would reform the nation from the top down), and “popular nationalists” (primarily working-class Cubans whose interests revolved around labor and racial politics from the bottom up). Such dividing of early independence Cuba into broad categories is not new and is similar to that done by Kapcia, who discussed different forms of cubanía, and Francisco López Segrera, who identified different forms of nationalist “blocs.” Guerra’s contribution to such models is to show that although these groups represented distinct interests and visions, they all bought into “the myth of Martí as social unity [that] connected conflicting visions of nation to each other by positing a common origin or foundation.” Each nationalist group argued that it was fulfilling the true mission of Martí. When disputes arose after independence — be they labor strikes, governmental repression, armed uprisings, U.S. occupations, or something else — Cubans attacked the “violators” for having destroyed this mythical social unity for “‘sectoral’ reasons” (p. 7). Ultimately, Guerra argues that the lack of a unified preindependence vision for a future Cuba (necessary to create a broad coalition) actually led to sectoral divides that finally undermined the creation of a strong Cuban state, so that by 1921 Cuba’s political weakness made it a neocolonial subordinate of the United States. This subordination cannot be blamed solely on U.S. imperialism; rather, Guerra stresses that it was also based on Cuban in-fighting that emerged from strong, though very different and conflictive, senses of Cuban nationalism that led to the weak state.There is much to like about this book. Guerra weaves sources into a compelling narrative that, though covering the period 1895 – 1921, focuses most intently on the first decade of independence. In addition, scholars familiar with the growing literature on postindependence Cuba will welcome the way she brings forth issues of the day and shows how different nationalist groups (and sometimes divisions within those groups) interpreted such issues. Finally, her chapters covering the 1904 – 9 period (i.e., just prior to the 1906 Civil War, the war itself, and the second U.S. intervention of 1906 – 9) are some of the best scholarship on this period in English or Spanish. Besides Cubanists, those interested in Latin American nationalism and the role of race and class conflict in nationalist visions will find this book engaging and fruitful.

Mongolian Politics in the Shadow of the Cold War: The 1964 Coup Attempt and the Sino-Soviet Split

After Nikita Khrushchev's condemnation of some of Stalin's crimes in 1956, the Mongolian People's Republic, following in the footsteps of the “fraternal” Soviet Union, also succumbed to the “thaw.” Khrushchev used de Stalinization to discredit his hardline opponents. Mongolia's leader, Yumjaagiyn Tsedenbal, was a Stalin-era holdover who came under criticism from his rivals for being unenthusiastic about political reforms. Tsedenbal had good reason to downplay de-Stalinization:He shared responsibility with Marshal Horloogiyn Choibalsan for violent repressions in the 1940s. But Tsedenbal outmaneuvered and eliminated his opponents in the late 1950s and early 1960s and consolidated his grip on power by 1964.Toward the end of that year, however, Tsedenbal once again was challenged, this time from an unexpected direction. Several members of the Central Committee of the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party (MPRP) used the precedent of Khrushchev's forced retirement from his leadership posts in Moscow in October 1964 as a pretext to overthrow Tsedenbal. At a plenum of the MPRP Central Committee in December 1964, Tsedenbal was accused of incompetence, corruption, disrespect for principles of “party democracy,” lack of economic discipline, and overreliance on the Soviet Union for credits. But Tsedenbal rebuffed the “anti-party group” and depicted the affair as an attempted coup engineered by pro-Chinese sympathizers and spies. Soviet leaders were wary of Chinese efforts to “subvert” Moscow's in fluence in the socialist camp and were therefore willing to endorse Tsedenbal's version of events.

Furthering Democracy in Mexico

IN JULY 2006, Mexico will have an opportunity to consolidate its democratic process for the first time in modern history. Only then wiUl it be clear whether the political changes of the past five years have taken hold-whether the country will go on building democracy and implementing much-needed reforms or instead fall into the sort of periodic crisis that has characterized too much of its past. The 2000 presidential election was Mexico's first truly democratic national contest in a century, and the victory of Vicente Fox-a former Coca-Cola executive running on the ticket of the center-right PAN (the National Action Party)-put an end to 71 years of oligarchic rule by the PRI (the Institutional Revolutionary Party). In contrast to the electoral theater and pseudodemocratic displays of the previous seven decades, and much to the credit ofthen President Ernesto Zedillo, the election was an honest one, and its results were incontrovertible. Fox's victory in 2000 triggered hopes for profound change, and the opening days of his presidency were a heady time for Mexicans. But it was not the first time Mexico had experienced such optimism. In 1911, Francisco Madero found himself at a similar turning point. He had become president after leading the first stage of the Mexican Revolution, but he was immediately bedeviled by a host of problems: a deeply divided Congress, an abusive press, the enmity of U.S. Ambas sador Henry Lane Wilson, and the hatred of a military establishment

The PRI’s Choice

This article explores the puzzle of why Mexico’s long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) implemented a series of electoral reforms in 1996 that precipitated its own downfall. Previous work explaining the process of Mexican democratization focuses on foreign pressures, interparty bargaining and a unified PRI. Alternatively, we argue that internal divisions in the PRI–conjoined with the threat of a presidential deal with the opposition–determined the particular shape of the reform. The article uses a bargaining model to illustrate the conjunction of interests between the President and PRI hard-liners while taking into account the shadow role played by the opposition. We argue, finally, that the model can be extended to aid explanations of other democratic transitions, as well as general cases of majority-party decision-making and coalition bargaining.

José Martí, precursor del 98, máximo exponente del Periodismo del siglo XIX

José Martí fue el periodista mejor informado del siglo XIX, además del más completo porque tocaba todos los géneros periodísticos. Una gran parte de la obra de este escritor cubano queda esparcida en multitud de periódicos y revistas. En este artículo se lleva a cabo un recorrido por sus diferentes etapas como periodista. En sus primeros pasos Martí se da cuenta de que la palabra era el mejor medio para desarrollar su vocación y publica sus primeros versos en 1868 en un periódico local. En su etapa inicial desarrolla un periodismo puramente político. A continuación, en México, inicia una etapa de periodismo total. En Estados Unidos desarrollará su labor periodística más intensa a escala continental, publicando en 1880 su primer artículo en inglés en la revista The Hour. En la última etapa, el periodismo de Martí llega a su cumbre con el periódico del Partido Revolucionario Cubano, Patria, que será su obra maestra.

The Former Marxist Leninist Parties in Africa after the End of the Cold War

The development of the formerly dominant communist parties in Africa provides an interesting set of cases to help refine the current literature on communist successor party adaptation. This paper first reiterates a theoretical framework derived from existing work on party development generally and the communist successor parties in post-communist Eastern European politics in particular. Using an interpretive technique I examine the evolution of five former Marxist Leninist parties in Africa: the Popular Movement for the liberation of Angola (Movimiento Popular para la Liberacion de Angola — MPLA), the Peoples’ Revolutionary Party of Benin (Parti du Revolutionare Popular du Benin — PRPB), the Congolese Labor Party (Parti Congolais du Travail — PCT), Frelimo (Frente de Libertacao de Mocambique), and the Workers’ Party of Ethiopia (Ye Ityopia Seratepnotch Parti — WPE).