El Salvador Encounters the Russian Revolution, 1917-1932

• In Event: The Long Cold War in Central America

Abstract

This paper grows out of a solicited contribution to the multi-volume series, Russia’s Great War and Revolution. Specifically, this paper will appear as a chapter in the volume dedicated to Latin America’s encounter with the Russian Revolution. In addition to exploring the development of communist and anti-communist movements in El Salvador in the roughly fifteen years after 1917, this paper seeks to explore the subjectivity and emotions in the socialist movement and the ways in which revolutionary self-hood was constructed discursively. My research indicates that Russia and its revolution existed at a fairly abstract level for many of the political activists who adopted Marxism and revolutionary militancy. It was not until 1930 that a formal Communist Party (PCS) was founded in El Salvador. Shortly thereafter the Party’s existence was defined by a peasant uprising that erupted in January 1932 and which resulted in the near destruction of the party and the murder of nearly half its members. For the members of the party, Russia served as an inspiration and a beacon of hope, but in practical terms it was a rather distant entity, notwithstanding the formal relations that existed between the party and the Comintern. In subjective terms, locally-constituted identities of ethnicity and class seem to have shaped the Salvadoran communists’ identities more than socialism as a concept and the Russian Revolution as an event.

Author

• Erik K Ching, Furman University