by Patrick Iber
Similarly, the particularly Cultural Cold War was built on what could be described as an international civil war within the global Left to define the ideas and practices that would guide political change. The divisions were evident at least from the time the Russian Revolution created an existing form of Communism and, in the Communist International (Comintern), a vehicle for its global dissemination. State interests—essential though they were when U.S.-Soviet diplomatic tensions settled into place over the course of the late 1940s—in many ways only hitched themselves to these existing conflicts. Superpower rivalry came to guarantee that the Cultural Cold War would be relatively well financed, but it began in the Left’s internal conflicts and its troubled relationship with dissenters.
Because Mexico City became a haven for left-wing exiles, including Trotsky, Serge, Pivert, and Gorkin, it was one of the key nodes in the global struggle. There, the key events of the Cultural Cold War had little to do with the United States or its government; instead, they originated in the intersection of the legacies of the Mexican Revolution, dissent from Stalinism, and the turmoil of the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939. The ideological conflict persisted even in the period of formal alliance between the rival powers created by World War II. Mexico City in the 1940s was simultaneously a Mexican, a Latin American, and a global city, and each layer contributed to laying the foundations of the Cultural Cold War to come.
Many of the European exiles who arrived in Mexico in the late 1930s and early 1940s knew almost nothing about the country that was granting them the right to refuge: Trotsky’s personal secretary remembers hastily reading an old encyclopedia article about Mexico on the day before boarding the boat that bore him across the Atlantic. But their ignorance was no obstacle, for Mexico granted asylum to left-wing political refugees with more generosity than any other state in the world, making it a haven for tens of thousands. It was an unexpected lifeline and, for some, like Trotsky, an equally unexpected graveyard.5
Even if some Europeans knew little about the country that took them in, a certain cosmopolitanism was nothing new to Mexico City. From at least the beginning of the twentieth century, Mexico and the United States maintained a healthy exchange of ideas and thinkers in fields such as sociology and education, making the city and its environs a laboratory for thinking through social problems. But what created the Mexico where Trotsky would live and die was the Mexican Revolution that began in 1910. The first mass popular revolution of the century featured revolutionaries on horseback and armies of peasants, and it made Mexico a locus of international left-wing politics. Even though its most romantic and popular figures, Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa, lost out in the armed struggle and were eventually assassinated, Mexico City still became a magnet for revolutionaries from other parts of the world, acquiring a southern polarity to attract northern radicals. Socialist journalist John Reed, for example, profiled Villa in Mexico years before he witnessed the “ten days that shook the world” of the Russian Revolution. By the end of the decade, as the armed phase of the conflict came to a close, Mexico had become an important haven for socialists, pacifists, and draft evaders from the United States who objected to U.S. participation in World War I or who sought to avoid the consequences of antiradical government raids. By 1919 the city was, in the words of historian Mauricio Tenorio, “both a refuge for the world’s radicals and a battlefield for world radicalism.”6
For foreigners from the United States, Mexico’s revolution created an opportunity to perform an accessible act of political pilgrimage. If the political culture of the United States seemed intolerant of their views and its society obsessed with material gain and dehumanizing industrialization, Mexico offered an intoxicating brew of poverty, violence, and an easily romanticized indigenous peasantry. Many radicals from the United States would have agreed with the Uruguayan writer José Enrique Rodó, who, in the essay Ariel, published in 1900, had argued that the commercial and technological United States lacked achievements in the “interests of the soul,” where Latin America supposedly excelled.7
Meanwhile, the revolution in Mexico had brought new men to power and had given workers and peasants who had fought some limited claims to social rights. The constitution of 1917, on paper among the world’s most progressive, promised good working conditions and access to land and made clear that Mexico, not foreign companies, owned the country’s natural resources. But these were aspirations, and a chasm separated them from the day-to-day reality of most Mexicans. Aware of the contradictions, postrevolutionary presidents generally greeted foreign radicals warmly. But they were also cautious and took steps to manage their presence, acting to ensure that friendliness toward the Mexican government remained in their best interest. Subsidies to radicals were not endorsements in Mexico’s political system; they were public relations and risk management. Linn Gale, who published an English-language magazine in Mexico City, received a stipend from the government of Venustiano Carranza, who served as constitutional president from 1917 to 1920. When the managing editor of the left-wing magazine The Nation arrived, Carranza’s successor, Álvaro Obregón, sent him to Yucatán, a state with a self-described socialist governor, where he would see political developments that most pleased him. English classes taught at government colleges were a valuable source of income for other resident radicals from the United States.8
Although the gap between paper and practice in the constitution of 1917 was enormous, the revolution did cause considerable cultural change. State bureaucracies for public education were created and expanded during the 1920s, both for the high arts and to begin the long process of expanding schooling to impoverished and isolated regions of the country. Prerevolutionary cultural elites in Mexico had frequently sought to emulate European styles; after the revolution a new set of artists and writers would look to the national, prenational, and even precolonial past for inspiration. The most dramatic manifestation of the change was in the visual arts, where the idiom of choice was the mural.
José Vasconcelos, the philosopher at the head of the Ministry of Public Education from 1921 to 1924, wanted state-sponsored murals to express a new nationalism. His single most potent instrument was the painter Diego Rivera, who returned from a period of European study in 1921. Rivera’s political and amorous lives were hopelessly tangled, but he was a hardworking painter and a gifted self-promoter who would become one of the best-known artists in the world by the 1930s. His earliest mural for Vasconcelos resembled the art of the Italian Renaissance, but gradually the movement of mural painting in Mexico, of which he was only the most prominent member, tried to rework European trends for the Mexican setting. Like the foreign radicals drawn into his bohemian circle, Rivera drew inspiration from indigenous art traditions and a romantic idea of Mesoamerican life before the arrival of Europeans. All this was compatible with the two major goals of President Obregón for the murals: to replace the international reputation of instability left by the revolution with one of cultural depth and sophistication, and to aid in the project of integrating the peasantry into the story of the nation, creating a cross-class nationalism.9
But the painters, including Rivera, were inspired by more radical and internationalist visions than was Obregón. Rivera and his contemporary and rival David Álfaro Siqueiros were keenly attuned to international politics and were cheered by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the promise of global transformation that it seemed to represent. In 1922 they formed the Union of Technical Workers, Painters, and Sculptors, committed to the narrow interest of preserving fair working conditions for themselves and their assistants and to the more grandiose projects of anticapitalism and anti-imperialism. El Machete, the biweekly organ of the union, eventually became the newspaper of Mexico’s Communist Party (Partido Comunista Mexicano, PCM), which had been founded in 1919.10
The union’s artistic manifesto called for the creation of a revolutionary avant-garde that united the artistic, the social, and the political. It repudiated easel painting as aristocratic and glo
rified monumental art because it could be a public possession. “Since this social moment is one of transition between a decrepit order and a new one,” it declared, “the creators of beauty must put forth their utmost efforts to make their production of ideological value to the people.” But the muralists’ ambitions outstripped their capacities. Early murals were commissioned for government buildings and were seen more by bureaucrats than by workers or peasants. And Mexico’s government wanted social peace, not class conflict. At the end of Obregón’s term in office, he halted all mural projects. His successor, Plutarco Elías Calles, took office in 1924 and did not reverse the decision; Rivera was practically the only painter allowed to stay active on state work. Revolutionary nationalism ceased, for a time, to be an artistic movement supported by the federal bureaucracy.11
Communist politics, however, beckoned. The PCM was still tolerated, and artists from around the world remained in Mexico City’s bohemian circles. “Everyone is a communist, a ‘red,’ ” wrote one visiting art student. “It is evident that one must take sides in Mexico, and the side that the painters are on is red, so I have decided to be a red, too.” It was a common-enough experience for foreign visitors. Tina Modotti, for example, an Italian-born actress, had arrived in Mexico in 1922, and she soon apprenticed herself to the photographer Edward Weston, then enjoying his own Mexican sojourn. He returned to the United States in 1923, but Modotti stayed and developed into an accomplished photographer in her own right, crafting elegant still-life images and depicting the lives of Mexico’s poor women and workers. One of her best-known photographs gazes down on a group of laborers sharing a single copy of El Machete. Her contributions to Communist politics were not only artistic. When Modotti became the lover of Xavier Guerrero, a painter and leading figure in the PCM, the Central Committee of the party began meeting in the living room of her apartment. In 1925, working with Bertram and Ella Wolfe, a Communist family in semivoluntary exile from Boston, Modotti began managing the activities of Comintern organizations in Mexico. These early fronts included the Anti-imperialist League of the Americas and International Red Aid, a kind of Communist Red Cross that took on the considerable task of palliating the sufferings of the victims of what it called “bourgeois injustice.”12
The scene could not last. Although Calles still helmed a rickety ship of state, he was busy cladding it with iron, and there was an evident trend toward conservative and bureaucratic politics. When Obregón was reelected in 1928 but was assassinated before he could take office, Calles set about constructing a party that could make peaceful transitions of power possible. In that, he succeeded wildly: his Partido Nacional Revolucionario (PNR), through two name changes, would hold the presidency for seventy-one years. As Calles was assembling a party to match his vision of a united Mexico, the country ceased to be a locus of international radical politics.
If a moment of rupture is needed, then the shots that killed Julio Antonio Mella are as good as any. Mella was a Cuban Communist and student leader living in Mexican exile, writing in El Machete, and planning to overthrow the dictator, Gerardo Machado, who had forced him out. Against the wishes of the Comintern, whose policies were tuned to the needs of the Soviet Union, Mella secretly prepared an armed revolutionary mission to the island. He did so at an inauspicious time in Communist history: Stalin, gathering power after the death of Lenin in 1924, had over the previous few years moved toward greater persecution of the internal opposition, particularly the “Left Opposition” of Trotsky, who became a figure of official vilification. Expelled from the Communist Party in late 1927, Trotsky had been forced out of the Soviet Union in February 1929. The same factional divisions were being imposed on Communist parties the world over, and individuals who were considered sympathetic to Trotsky—the most obvious hallmark being an excessive commitment to extending revolution in a time of consolidation in the USSR—found themselves in trouble with local parties. Mella fell well inside that category. Among the international agents who helped guide the PCM was Vittorio Vidali, sent by Moscow to align unreliable Mexican Communists with international norms. Vidali returned from a Comintern meeting in Havana in 1928 with an order for Mella to “subordinate [himself] to the C[entral] C[ommittee] of the Mexican Communist Party.” Mella was expelled from the party and then readmitted shortly before he was shot on the street on 10 January 1929.13
The funeral march of Julio Antonio Mella’s body through the streets of Mexico City, January 1929. Diego Rivera walks just behind the floral sickle. Photo courtesy Archivo General de la Nación, Collection Enrique Díaz, envelope 30/1.
Years later, during the Cold War, it would become an anti-Communist trope that Vidali was a globe-trotting Communist assassin, and some charged that Mella’s murder was the result of yet another sectarian purge. Mella, as he lay dying, blamed Cuban assassins sent by Machado, and the best available historical information corroborates that account. In the wake of the murder, however, a nasty swarm of press sensationalism and official hostility surrounded Mella’s lover, Tina Modotti, who had been at his side when he was shot. Diego Rivera, still the PCM’s most famous member, shielded Modotti from the press and the prosecutors as best he could. For its part, the party forgot Mella’s heterodox views and turned his funeral into a defiant parade. Rivera led much of the procession that enshrined Mella as a martyr of Latin American Communism.14
Although it was almost certainly the Cuban dictator who was responsible for the murder, the Mexican government used the resulting scandal as the rationale to repress foreign Communists in Mexico. When some leaders of the PCM endorsed an armed uprising in the state of Veracruz early in 1929, the Mexican government took further action. Police raided the offices of El Machete and the PCM in June and again in August, the second time destroying the printing equipment of the newspaper. The paper and the party entered a period of semiclandestine operation that would last until 1935. Modotti was deported later in 1929 even as the PCM, under pressure from Moscow, entered an ultrasectarian period, conducting its own internal purges: most notably, it expelled Diego Rivera for his Trotskyist sympathies and for having failed to endorse the revolt in Veracruz. The next year, the Mexican government raided party headquarters and arrested Communists throughout the country.15
The first idyll of bohemian radicalism in Mexico had lasted approximately a decade, from 1919 to 1929. A second wave of revolutionaries would arrive a decade later, coming in large numbers in 1939. But it was the European decade in between that laid the foundations for their Cultural Cold War. Anti-Trotskyist expulsions in Mexico were only the local manifestation of a global phenomenon; many of those leaving or being forced out of the Communist Party had been trained in the favored organizational techniques of the Comintern, including the use of front groups. Some would use the same techniques to defend themselves and tear away for decades to come at Stalin’s claim to command the world’s revolutionary movement.
Trotsky was still alive and thus the most potent symbol of an alternative revolutionary politics to what actually existed in the Soviet Union. His was a sharp and rigid mind, and by the 1930s he was a powerfully attractive figure to a small camp of followers, especially intellectuals. Two things gave Trotskyism some purchase as a movement. One was that it became an all-purpose term of abuse in orthodox Communist circles. The fabrications of Soviet show trials in the 1930s held Trotsky and his supposed followers responsible for absurd conspiracies; Trotskyist sabotage was blamed for everything from bad weather to industrial breakdown. Trotsky’s example made it possible for former Communists, convinced of the sickness of Stalin’s leadership, to believe that the problem with actually existing Communism was Stalin’s personal betrayal of revolutionary principles, not systemic failure. Trotsky’s acid pen etched a critique of Stalinism, and this critique was the one thing that almost none of his followers abandoned, even if they eventually distanced themselves from the man himself. In The Revolution Betrayed, published in 1936, Trotsky wrote that the Soviet bureaucracy dominated the masses rather than y
ielding to them. He argued that the Stalinist system sought to control ideas and history through official texts and by pressuring artists and writers to conform to the interpretations of the will of leaders. This “totalitarian” intention—Trotsky uses the word mainly in this cultural context in The Revolution Betrayed—analytically united Communism under Stalin and fascism under Hitler.16
The second quality of Trotskyism that made it attractive to intellectuals was its reputation for defending a more pluralistic revolution. Trotsky imagined a different relationship between intellectuals and the state under Communism in ways that were profoundly attractive for dissident thinkers excised from a movement that demanded orthodoxy. In his pamphlet Literature and Revolution, published in 1924, he argued that the state should not choose styles or eliminate critical traditions within the revolutionary camp. There were limits, however, for Trotsky was no liberal: he policed the thinking of his followers rather imperiously and believed in the censorship of antirevolutionary art. Literature and Revolution made a general defense of critical traditions, but it also contained an attack on the Russian avant-garde that led to affiliated artists being fired and the formalist movement’s eventual suppression.17
Soviet policies had approximated Trotsky’s views in the early 1920s, a period of considerable artistic dynamism, but gradually more and more cultural controls were introduced. Culture was taken seriously as part of social transformation. In 1932, at a meeting with writers at the home of Maxim Gorky, Stalin declared them the “engineer[s] of the human soul.” But that gathering also established the principles of official socialist realism, a state doctrine that required artists to express support for revolutionary values with techniques prescribed by party officials. Socialist realist style was heroic and teleological and lacked irony. Above all, it had to be comprehensible to the masses—experimental and nonfigurative works were considered degenerate and unacceptable. But in a pattern that would be repeated, just as the Soviet Union began to insist on artistic conformity at home, it reached out with sophisticated campaigns to secure the sympathy of prominent intellectuals of the Western European Left.18
