Beyond the Cold War. Czechoslovakia's Policy toward Allende’s Chile

If the “Soviet-American Cold War” was almost dead not long after Cuban missile crisis, there was, among other Cold Wars “the inter-American Cold War” (for concept see Harmer 2011; for multiplicity of the concept of Cold War see Brands 2012), the struggle against the dependence and for restoration of the independence in the context of North-South relations. Allende’s Chile (1970–1973) as one of the milestones of that kind of the Cold War, especially US complicity in the Chilean politics and in fall of Allende, remains to this day hotly debated (most recently Haslam 2005; Qureshi 2008; Harmer 2011). Nevertheless, the policy of the USSR (disregarding the writings of the 70s and 80s) and especially Eastern Bloc countries remains to the present rather on the edge of the interest (albeit it now gradually changes). The presentation focuses on the peculiarity of former Czechoslovak-Chilean relations that cannot be interpreted by schematic “cold war logic”. Specifically, it will be argued that Czechoslovak economic and trade policy with Chile was far from “generous” help to another socialist country and in some way, it reflected standard pattern of Soviet policy of that time of “mutually beneficial relations”. As important as economic relationships were the political attitudes of Czechoslovak communist leadership to Allende’s coalition Unidad Popular, as expressed particularly by the documents of Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Interestingly, Czechoslovak officials reached through them gradually skeptical view of some Chilean “comrades” from the Unidad Popular and the whole Allende governance. The presentation concludes that if Czechoslovak communist leadership was as distant (and as doctrinaire) toward Allende’s coalition during the second half of 1972 and considerable part of 1973 as their Soviet of Eastern German Communist counterparts, probably it was not on the whole the effect of the “influence of Moscow”, but presumably in some way the consequence of as “the parallel process of the thinking”.