Baseline for Change: The Brezhnev Legacy

Post-Stalin Policies toward the Third World

Soviet policy toward Central America and the Caribbean was often shaped fortuitously by unexpected regional events and opportunities, such as the triumph of the Sandinista revolution or Cuba's interest and success in pursuing overseas adventures. At the same time, through the post-Stalin period, the Kremlin's Central American relations closely followed three broad shifts in the Third World policies of Stalin's heirs. Today, therefore, to understand Moscow's relations with countries in the Central American region, it is helpful to view these current relations in the larger context of Soviet policies toward the Third World in the post-Stalin years.

Mikhail Gorbachev shattered well established and long practiced Stalinist-Brezhnevian policies when he introduced glasnost and "new political thought," extensively reoriented Soviet foreign policy, and shook up the foreign policy establishment. Yet his reforms had precedents rooted in the vigorous efforts of Brezhnev's predecessor, Nikita Khrushchev. In contrast to the relative faithfulness with which the Brezhnev course clung to Stalinist orthodoxy, Khrushchev had given special impetus to a lengthy process of dismantling the Stalinist foreign policy model that had been under way for years. This process, thoroughly documented by Jerry Hough in his study of the debates of experts on Third World affairs, began, in fact, with the death of Stalin.

Soviet Third World policy in the post-Stalin years may be divided into three periods, each marked by an abrupt change of course, and each providing an important conceptual framework for a distinctly different policy direction. Khrushchev, in a speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1956, showcased and justified the first great policy reversal. Shifting the Kremlin's foreign policy away from Stalin's blanket rejection of contacts with the newly liberated nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, he called for a policy of peaceful competition between East and West for influence in the Third World. The second great shift, which emerged well into the Brezhnev regime in the second half of the 1970s, veered away from economic aid policies designed to win friends, toward vigorous support of armed revolutionary movements in the Third World. The third and final shift was sparked by the "new political thought" of the Gorbachev era and swung back toward peaceful coexistence of a new kind, based on the concept of an interdependent world. These three Soviet policy orientations toward the Third World successively dominated Soviet-Central American policy during the regimes of Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Gorbachev. To dominate did not mean, of course, that each change of direction immediately obliterated the policy lines of its predecessors. Through the post-Stalin period, regardless of the prevailing policy trend at any moment, various groups within the Soviet political elite cultivated conflicting preferences and sought to shape Soviet Third World policies accordingly. Thus threads from earlier periods remained into the Gorbachev years as part of the historical context and provided continuities that either contested or reinforced Gorbachev's new course and policies.

The Khrushchev Policy: Peaceful Competition

Khrushchev reversed the pessimistic policies of Stalin, based on the old dictator's perception of all noncommunist governments as essentially "lackeys of imperialism," enemies of the Soviet Union, and proper targets of violent revolutionary action. Acknowledging the new dangers of superpower confrontation in a nuclear era, Khrushchev called for peaceful coexistence with the United States, renounced armed struggle as the vehicle for socialist victory in the Third World, and predicted the triumph of Soviet socialism worldwide by peaceful methods that would be facilitated by expanded state-to-state and economic relations. Material aid from socialist countries and the superiority of their systems and ideology were to become mainsprings of the "liberation" of Third World countries from the "capitalist-imperialist camp." And although Soviet arms continued to flow to various liberation groups, the Khrushchev line placed a new emphasis upon strengthening economic, political, and ideological support of such movements.

In Central America this policy translated into instructions from Moscow to indigenous communist parties to encourage contacts with the local middle class and the military in order to reinforce Soviet efforts to stimulate diplomacy and trade. The efforts set in motion by Khrushchev to develop diplomatic ties scored solid gains in the Western hemisphere over the next quarter century. At the start of his drive, in 1960, the USSR had no formal state-to-state ties in Central America and only three embassies in all of South America (Argentina, Mexico, and Uruguay), but by 1985 the Kremlin had forged linkages with eighteen Latin American countries. Among the Soviet diplomatic partners in the Caribbean Basin in the pre-Gorbachev period were the Central American states of Costa Rica, Guatemala (diplomatic ties, but no embassy), and Nicaragua; the Caribbean island states of Cuba, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago; and the Caribbean littoral states of Colombia, Guyana, Mexico, Surinam, and Venezuela. For a brief time in 1982–83, the list also included Grenada.

Initially, Cuba was slow to accept the Khrushchevian line, which the Soviets continued to pursue during Brezhnev's first decade. Indeed, until 1968, Cuban policy remained firmly committed to the concept of armed revolution as the path to power, and Fidel Castro resolutely refused to cooperate with other pro-Soviet Latin American parties. As Robert Leiken notes, the Cuban leader was still visibly demonstrating his independence as late as August 1967 at a meeting of the Organization of Latin American Solidarity (OLAS) in Havana: "There Castro attacked those 'antiquated' parties for betrayal of the revolution and conspiring against Cuba. He accused Soviet bloc countries of 'aiding the oligarchs' of Latin America by pursuing economic ties [with them]." Through the 1960s, according to W. Raymond Duncan, tensions between the two countries escalated, and the situation became "so strained during 1966–1968 that a break in relations seemed possible over the question of armed revolution in the Third World, especially in Latin America."

Yet, sometime in 1968 Havana and Moscow appeared to have struck a deal. In Duncan's words, "For a number of reasons, including but not limited to, the application of Soviet economic leverage on Cuba, Castro realigned his foreign policy with Moscow during the summer of 1968." And in addition to adopting a strict official observance of the Soviet foreign policy line,...