The Venezuelan Guerrilla as Seen from the Central Committee of the CPSU

The article provides an analysis of the panorama of the Vene-zuelan guerrilla movement as seen in the USSR and in the ap-paratus of the Central Committee of the CPSU. This percep-tion was formed over the basis of documents received in Moscow as also due to the conversations hold in the USSR with representatives of leftist parties. The authors draw atten-tion to the peculiarities of the contacts that the International Department of the Central Committee of the CPSU had with the Communist Party of Venezuela and the Leftist Revolu-tionary Movement (both these parties led guerilla warfare in the country in the 1960s). One of the features of these rela-tions was their implementation in the context of the ties of both the Venezuelan guerrillas and the CPSU with the Cuban Communists. In general, the historiography of the Venezuelan Guerilla is not sparse, but a number of aspects of the problem (including relations between guerillas and the CPSU) represent a gap in history due to limited access to archival materials. After the partial declassification of documents from the Russian State Archive of Modern History, it became possible to create a more complete picture of the history of the Vene-zuelan leftist movement, including its international context.