Boris Ponomarev: unsung anti-colonial hero of people's history?

[Die Neue Zeit]

While Trotskyists continued to gain no mass appeal past Sri Lanka (in part due to Trotsky's own musings on possible proletarian civil war with the peasantry (http://www.cpgb.org.uk/article.php?article_id=1004118)), while the imperialist economism (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/sep/00.htm) of left-communists remained dormant, while Khrushchev backed off from Third World politics shortly before his ouster, while Hoxha went forward with irrational economic isolationism, while Tito raked up debt owed to the West, while Mao toasted to the good health of Suharto and Idi Amin (not to mention Nixon), while Third Campism gave way to supporting Western imperialism, and while Gromyko settled into detente, Boris Ponomarev and his co-thinkers sparked and pushed forward with the decline and collapse of colonialism.

As Secretary of the CC CPSU responsible for the International Department of the CC CPSU, Ponomarev was responsible for Soviet foreign affairs not under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Gromyko) or the Department of the CC CPSU for Liaison with Communist and Workers Parties in Socialist Countries. The efforts of the International Department led to the consolidation of anti-colonial struggles under Soviet guidance, from Cuba to Vietnam to various African countries to Afghanistan. The efforts of the International Department also allowed thinkers like Veniamin Chirkin to suggest "non-capitalist development" and "national-democratic revolution" for anti-colonial movements that even seized power by means of Breakthrough Military Coups.

http://mesharpe.metapress.com/app/home/contribution.asp?referrer=parent&backto=issue,1,6;journal,147,228;linkingpublicatio nresults,1:110919,1
http://www.icsbrussels.org/ICS/2000/2000en/ludo1.htm

Thoughts?

[Jose Gracchus]

Party hacks' publications reflect the political requirements of the class and state that produced them: what a surprise.

[bcbm]

could be more obscure, try harder

[Die Neue Zeit]

Party hacks' publications reflect the political requirements of the class and state that produced them: what a surprise.

That may be the case, but Ponomarev and those under him clashed a number of times with the "realpolitik" Ministry of Foreign Affairs. One of the reasons why Khrushchev was ousted was backing off too much after the Cuban Missile Crisis with regards to Third World anti-colonial support (but credit him, though, for being more aggressive than Stalin ever was).

[MarxSchmarx]

Doesn't this strike you as precisely the mirror image of cargo-cult party-building routine you critiqued for these CPSU inspired parties in the global north? It sure does to me - if anything it seems even more along those lines, since often the communist parties of many of these countries mentioned in the two articles where deliberately set up by soviet advisors. So all the standard criticisms that apply to the main communist parties in the west would, it seems, be amplified in Ponomarev's work.


could be more obscure, try harder


It seems like this guy had a very key post in the USSR during some transformative years with respect to global politics. Why would this make him obscure?

[Die Neue Zeit]

^^^ Comrade, I was referring mainly to Ponomarev's anti-colonial work (relations with "progressive forces"), not his activity with regards to relations with non-ruling CPs, based on the usual Popular Front antics.

[Die Neue Zeit]

From another thread:


I don't see anything "anti-colonialist" about him. He was simply the frontman for Soviet foreign policy initiatives. The Soviets took advantage of anti-colonialism, and revisionist attempts to placate petty-bourgeois left-wing regimes with "non-capitalist development" reflect that.

But what unites Maoists, Hoxhaists, and pro-Soviet tendencies is two-stage development, no?

[Red Future]

Didn't he write the "History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union" in 1960? or was that another individual with a similar name ?

[Omsk]

Yes,he wrote "History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union" in 1960.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Is there a link to that work? I'd like to read Ponomarev's take on the Iskra period (the pre-RSDLP period and the first few years immediately after). It would be a shame if he deviated from Stalin's own written words that WITBD "brilliantly substantiated the fundamental Marxist thesis that a Marxist party is a merger of the worker movement with socialism." (http://www.revleft.com/vb/history-cpsu-bolsheviks-t80616/index.html?p=1177113)