Making Peaceful Revolution Impossible

President John F. Kennedy's Alliance for Progress was intended to forestall Communist revolutions by fostering political and economic reform in Latin America. But Kennedy undermined his own goals by thwarting democratic, leftwing leaders seeking to carry out the kind of “peaceful revolution” his own analysis told him was necessary. This article reveals the Kennedy administration's role in overthrowing the Guatemalan government in 1963—until now only hinted at or even denied in the existing literature—to prevent the return to power of the country's first democratically elected president, Juan José Arévalo Bermejo. New archival evidence from Chile, Cuba, Guatemala, Mexico, Uruguay, the United Kingdom, and the United States sheds light on the transnational networks that supported Arévalo's attempt to run for the presidency in 1963, as well as the covert efforts of U.S. and Guatemalan officials to prevent “the most popular man in Guatemala” from taking office—a neglected Cold War milestone in Latin America.

“Doomed to Good Relations”

This article sheds new light on the end of the Cold War and the fate of anti-imperialism in the twentieth century by exploring how the Soviet Union and the Islamic Republic of Iran achieved a rapprochement in the late 1980s. Both the USSR and Iran had invested significant resources into presenting themselves as the leaders of the anti-imperialist movement and “the global movement of Islam,” and both the Soviet and Iranian governments sought to export their models of anti-imperialist postcolonial statehood to Afghanistan. However, by the mid-1980s both the Soviet Union and revolutionary Iran were forced to confront the limits to their anti-imperialist projects amid the increasing pull of globalization. Elites in both countries responded to these challenges by walking back their commitments from world revolution and agreeing to maintain the Najibullah regime in Afghanistan as a bulwark against Islamist forces hostile to Marxism-Leninism and Iran's brand of Islamic revolution. This joint pragmatic turn, however, contributed to a drought in anti-imperialist politics throughout the Middle East, leaving the more radical voices of transnational actors as one of the only consistent champions of anti-imperialism. Drawing on new sources from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, as well as sources from Iran, Afghanistan, and the “Afghan Arabs,” the article sheds empirical and analytical light on discussions of the fate of anti-imperialism in the twilight of the Cold War.

From Crisis Management to Realignment of Forces

In 1969, after a series of large-scale border clashes, the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Soviet Union finally decided to enter negotiations to prevent a wider military confrontation. The de-escalation process that ensued gave Soviet and Chinese leaders two options: either to compromise and reach a settlement or to go back to a strategy of delay. This article shows that the choice between the two options depended on whether either state believed it could improve its relative position in a better political environment or could gain certain political advantage by immediately settling the dispute. Ultimately, both sides chose to return to a strategy of delay. The Chinese decision was influenced by the strategic configuration of U.S. “triangular” diplomacy and the hope that it would enhance the PRC's relative position. For Soviet officials, the outcome stemmed from a lack of trust in their Chinese counterparts.

“Communist Muslims”

Soviet leaders sent troops into Afghanistan in December 1979 to support a friendly Marxist-Leninist regime in its conflict against a popular insurgency and help it build a new society. When the Soviet troops withdrew nine years later, they left behind a state that had none of the nominal characteristics of a Soviet-type Communist country. During the war, the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan had discarded Marxism-Leninism and turned to Islam. This article examines how, with Moscow's support, the Afghan Communists Islamicized their discourse and policies as they tried to gain support from the population and co-opt insurgent fighters.

“You Don't Know Khrushchev Well”

The ouster of Nikita Khrushchev in October 1964 was a key moment in the history of elite politics in one of the most important authoritarian regimes of the twentieth century. Yet political scientists and historians have long seemed uninterested in Khrushchev's downfall, regarding it as the largely “inevitable” result of his supposedly unpopular policies. Archival sources that have recently come to light cast serious doubt on this assessment and demonstrate new ways of measuring contingency. By showing the countermeasures Khrushchev could have taken, the importance of timing, and the sense among the plotters that their move was highly risky, this article demonstrates that Khrushchev's defeat was far from preordained. The lesson of October 1964 is not that policy differences or failures lead inexorably to political defeat, but that elite politics in Marxist-Leninist regimes is inherently ambiguous, personal, and, most importantly, highly contingent.