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Camaradas
e Companheiros
Pandolfi, Dulce Chaves, Camaradas e Companheiros : História e Memória do PCB, Relume-Dumará: Fundação Roberto Marinho, Rio de Janeiro, 1995.
In 1992, after 70 years of existence, the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) disbanded. Following the decisions of its 10th congress the party decided to put an end to its activities as a communist party. Following the path of other communist parties around the world, the majority of the delegates decided to change the name, the symbol and the structure of the party creating a new one. Strikingly, the new party, despite ridding itself of so much, continues to regard itself as the heir of the old party. Albeit unsuccessfully, a rival group has been trying to keep the organisation as it was in the past with the slogan: 'We have been, we are and we will be forever communists'.
The PCB was the most enduring political party in Brazilian political history, even though it faced difficult periods throughout its existence. During these seven decades the party could only act as a legal organisation for less than ten years, in two quite distinct and separate periods. One could say that the entire history of the PCB was marked by the paradox of proclaiming itself as a revolutionary party and yet attempting to form part of a legal political framework advancing a democratic agenda. Its life was thus marked by the process of conflict and integration. This led to some periods of almost total integration, accepting the rules of bourgeois order; and others of total and fierce opposition to the government of the day.
One interesting aspect of the party's history is the fact that it was unable to develop its own official history. Due to the hard conditions of the clandestinity and to some internal problems it was only officially tried once, when a history commission was established in the 1970s, but the attempt did not succeed. That failure might be credited mainly to a sense of protectiveness. This could still be witnessed in interviews with certain groups of former PCB militants for whom it is sometimes still difficult to provide information about their own activities within the party and about the party's own actions. As a real or perceived danger to different Brazilian governments throughout its existence, the PCB was an easy scapegoat for the agitation and the turmoil amongst the workers.
Having said this, the PCB did have to show great caution to protect itself in periods of severe repression. As the main target for the authoritarian regime the PCB had to be very careful with regard documents, reports, official diaries etc. All sort of things could be used against them as proof of activities opposing the government. One very well known episode showing the dangers of laxness was the seizure by the police of the Prestes notebooks just after the military coup in 1964. These notebooks were personal diaries of the PCB general secretary Luís Carlos Prestes, by far the most important indidual in the party's history and head of the PCB's organisation for 40 years. His private notes about the secret meetings of the Party at the previous period before the coup, including names and political positions of his peers, gave to the dictatorship important information which were used to prosecute several militants of the PCB. In such circumstances a source for historians could be easily transformed into a source for an official prosecution by the police.
Nevertheless, we can find great number of writings about the PCB. These include academic works, memoirs of militants and other historical researches. We now have several institutions within which we can find large amounts of documentation including newspapers and party's publications, interviews and personal papers of militants. [1] Among them are Arquivo de Memória Operária do Rio de Janeiro (AMORJ) located at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (IFCS/UFRJ); Centro de Pesquisas e Documentação de História Contemporânea do Brasil (CPDOC); and Arquivo Edgard Leuenroth located at Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). An ongoing project, the Programa de Preservação da Memória do PCB, now brings together almost all institutions involved with the recuperation of the party's history, including the recovery of archives, books, photographs, newspapers and oral records.
An analysis of a political party can be easily distorted by the blur produced in the political battlefield. The fact is that living almost its entire life undercover and participating in almost all the important periods of Brazilian republican life from 1922-1992, the PCB became an important element in all kinds of stories and myths. These accounts were thus at the very forefront of the political struggle. Most of such propaganda presented the communists either as heroes and relentless freedom-fighters or, conversely, as fanatics, sectarians and dangerous authoritarians. As viewed from the party's own press or from conservative newspapers and books, the actions of the real human beings who made up the PCB seem to have vanished into thin air.
Dulce Pandolfi's book, in contrast, provides an acute and impartial analysis of the party's history without losing sight of a more politically engaged perspective. It covers the whole history of the party but in a non-chronological fashion. The aim of the book is to analyse the views built up by the party towards its own history which is, for Pandolfi, 'the central and strategic element of its political identity' (page 14). To address this issue, she uses as tools of analysis such concepts as collective memory, individual memory and official memory. Based on a very comprehensive range of documents, both written and oral, Pandolfi shows the complex process of building up a political identity. Using very dissimilar views of militants in different echelons of the party, she points out the successive distinct identities experienced by the militants of the PCB throughout its history.
By including these discordant views Pandolfi avoids the monochordal approach of official histories and shows the contradictions in party actions, practices and representations. Particular periods or episodes are highlighted around which the party could develop its identity. First the book analyses the representations of the origins of the party and the significance of the break with anarchism for early Brazilian communists. Secondly, it examines the radical experience during the backfired communist uprising of 1935. The following section examines the relationship between the party and its charismatic leader during the long period in which it was known as the 'Party of Prestes'. In the next two chapters the tension between the ideas of reform and revolution and its relationship with Brazilian realities is considered. There are striking testimonies by PCB militants bearing both positive and negative views of the short period of legality between 1945 and 1947 and attempted explanations of the military coup of 1964. For the latter, some militants seemed to blame the passivity of the party's reformist stance, whilst others attributed the responsibility to the anxiety of holding a revolutionary position. The book's last section is devoted to the final years of transformation that seemed to decree either the death of the party or at least a dramatic change from what had previously been known as the PCB.
Pandolfi's analysis is very sensitively presented, in contrast with more sensationalist accounts that focus above all on the PCB's relationship with the Soviet Union. Another recent book Camaradas, by the journalist William Waack, demonstrates the difference. While supported by extensive research in the Moscow archives, Camaradas seems to reinforce clichés about Moscow gold and the CPSU's almost total control over the PCB without taking into account the national component acting upon that interference and attempt at control. These differences are highlighted by the two authors' divergent understanding of the communist uprising of 1935, one of the defining moments in the PCB's history. Traditionally, at least in the more sensationalist literature, the event has been characterised as an international conspiracy arranged and prompted by Moscow with the Brazilian communists figuring as mere puppets. [2] Pandolfi, however, is among those authors taking quite the opposite view. She argues it was really the Brazilian communists with their characteristic self-confidence who, during a meeting in Moscow, had convinced the Comintern of the preeminence of the Brazilian revolution, thus giving a very distorted and inflated perspective of their own possibilities.
Pandolfi's book is thus not only a fruitful contribution to the history of political parties in Brazil and particularly to the history of the PCB. It also provides a crucial new dimension by analysing the party through the representations of the actors involved.
