At twenty past noon on 22 August 1978, two light-green trucks pulled up to the side entrances of the National Palace in Managua. Twenty-five Sandinistas in stolen National Guard uniforms jumped out, seized a building holding some two thousand people, including most of the Nicaraguan Congress, and held it for two days until the dictator Anastasio Somoza gave in to their demands. The Agony of a Dictatorship opens on that raid because its two authors watched the Somoza regime from close range in exactly those months. Oleg Ignatiev and Genrikh Borovik were Soviet journalists — Ignatiev the Pravda correspondent who also wrote Secret Weapon in Africa (Progress, 1977), the companion volume in this series, Borovik a reporter with a novelist's eye — and they were in Central America "some six months before the downfall of the Somoza regime," as their note to the reader puts it. The book is two books bound as one: Ignatiev's The Storm of Tiscapa, a chronicle of the dynasty's rise and fall with the documents laid end to end, and Borovik's Sandinista Camp Glimpses, a piece of literary reportage from a guerrilla hideout and a refugee camp. It is not theory and does not pretend to be. It is war journalism with a thesis, and the thesis is a true one: that the tyranny falling in Nicaragua had been built, armed, trained and protected for forty-five years by the United States. Much of what the book documents under that heading is real, and an honest introduction should say so before it says anything else.
The date. The spine reads 1980 and the translation, by Arthur Shkarovsky, is of that year; but unlike several titles in this series the text is not older than its jacket. Ignatiev's chronicle runs to the morning of 19 July 1979, when the first foreign newsmen — five Soviet reporters among them — landed at the newly captured Managua airport and saw the red-and-black flag flying over Somoza's abandoned bunker on Tiscapa Hill. Borovik's section is dated "Central America — Moscow, October 1978–January 1979." So this is a genuinely late-1970s book, written in the heat of events and published within a year of the victory. That matters for how it should be read. It was commissioned as the Soviet press apparatus commissioned such things: a well-connected Pravda man, back from the spot, delivering to readers at home and abroad the fall of a hated American client at the precise moment it happened. Somoza fled in July 1979; the New Jewel Movement had taken Grenada that March; a revolution was building in El Salvador. For Moscow the Nicaraguan revolution was a gift, and a book celebrating it — datelined Managua, carrying the eyewitness authority the reference volumes in this series so conspicuously lack — was exactly the export the moment called for.
Begin with the credit, because the criticism that follows is worthless if a reader thinks the book is invented. It is not. The Somoza dictatorship was real, and so were its crimes, and the American hand behind it was real to a degree that would embarrass any apologist. On the family's wealth the book is precise and, in its own dry way, devastating: Ignatiev walks the reader through Managua pointing out that the airline, the hotel, the department store, the textile mill, the brewery, the power station, the television and radio stations and the newspaper are all Somoza-owned — a whole country run as, in Borovik's phrase, "a sort of family heirloom." When a disastrous earthquake killed more than ten thousand people in December 1972, Somoza had himself made head of the relief committee and pocketed much of the roughly $190 million in international aid; the book documents this from the Nicaraguan opposition's own manifestos and from the Italian magazine L'Europeo. None of it is Soviet fabrication.
Nor is the American record. The National Guard that tortured and "disappeared" Nicaraguans was a US creation — trained at Fort Gulick in the Canal Zone and at Fort Bragg, its officers schooled at West Point, its rifles shipped from the United States. Ignatiev reconstructs the founding crime of the dynasty carefully: in February 1934 the guerrilla leader Augusto César Sandino, who had fought the US Marines to a standstill, was lured to Managua and murdered on Somoza's orders — and, on the testimony of a National Guard lieutenant present, with the express blessing of the US ambassador Arthur Bliss Lane. He notes that one of the first aerial bombings of a civilian town in the hemisphere was the Marine raid on Ocotal in 1927, "eight years before Mussolini's Italians exercised in gunning down defenceless Abyssinians from the air" and ten before Guernica. He records that the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba was launched from Nicaraguan soil. And he catches the Carter administration in its own contradiction: in mid-1978, the Washington Post reported, President Carter sent Somoza a personal note congratulating him "for promises to improve the human rights situation," weeks before a military-training grant for the Guard went through Congress.
The book's method here deserves the same credit the Africa volume earned. Ignatiev cites, and he convicts Washington out of Western mouths — Newsweek on the fortune the Marine Corps had installed, the Washington Post and the New York Times on Somoza's paid friends in Congress, the Wall Street Journal admitting that "we established the National Guard, trained it and gave it guns." When he quotes the "catechism" drilled into Guard recruits by an American mercenary instructor — "'What do tigers feed on?' 'Red blood.' 'Whose blood?' 'The blood of the people'" — he is reproducing testimony published in a Costa Rican paper, not composing it in Moscow. And the human core of the book, the pages that stay with a reader, are the testimonies: the poet Ernesto Cardenal, whose island commune the Guard destroyed, saying that "to be young in Nicaragua today is a crime"; the fourteen-year-old who lost an arm to his own bomb and was tortured with electricity in five jails; the mother reading aloud the last letter of a dead son. This is real suffering, honestly transmitted. Where the book records the violence of Somoza and his sponsors, believe it. The epigraph the book hangs on Franklin Roosevelt — "Somoza is a sonofabitch, but he's ours" — is almost certainly apocryphal, and no introduction should present it as documented; but the relationship it names is not in doubt, and the book proves that relationship from the archive rather than the quip.
The trouble is not with what the book documents but with the frame it fits the documentation into — and the frame becomes visible at the one point where the Soviet author steps out of the chronicle to give a political judgement. Ignatiev is anxious, throughout, to place a particular organisation at the moral centre of the revolution: the "Nicaraguan Socialist (Communist) Party," the pro-Moscow PSN. He gives its founding in 1944 a loving paragraph, its persecution its due, and — crucially — presents its caution as wisdom. The PSN, he explains, believed in the early 1960s that armed struggle against Somoza was "premature" and that a revolution needed first "an independent working class party" to lead it; the young Sandinistas, by contrast, "ignored explanatory work among the masses." Both sides, he concludes, "were maximalists," and he reaches for two passages of Lenin from 1905 to hold the balance between them — quoting Collected Works on the need to combine armed action with patient work among the masses.
It reads as even-handed. It is not. The party the Soviet account credits with the correct line was the party that stood aside from the insurrection that actually won. The Sandinista Front was founded, in 1961–62, by militants who left the pro-Moscow party precisely because it would not fight; Carlos Fonseca Amador, whom the book rightly honours as a founder and martyr, was one of them. The Fourth International press said so at the time, in the same weeks Ignatiev's book was being set. Writing in Intercontinental Press on 3 September 1979, six weeks after the victory, Pedro Camejo, Sergio Rodríguez and Fred Murphy described the FSLN as having been founded by "young rebels who broke with the reformism of the Stalinist Nicaraguan Socialist Party." The organisation the Soviet book routes the revolution's legitimacy through — the responsible vanguard, gently instructing the hotheads — is the organisation the revolutionaries had to break with in order to make the revolution. Ignatiev cannot say this, because the whole architecture of official Communism rests on the claim that history vindicates the pro-Moscow party. So the party's abstention becomes prudence, the Sandinistas' break becomes youthful excess later corrected, and Lenin is enlisted to make the two look like halves of one truth. The silence is not about a fact the author lacked. It is about the one fact that would spoil the shape.
There is a related evasion in how the book handles the Sandinistas' own politics. It quotes their 1977 programme at length and approvingly, dwelling on the passages that promise most: that the revolution's goals will be secured "given a Marxist-Leninist approach and a firmly knit vanguard to direct the revolutionary process," that a worker-peasant government will "make socialism triumphant and create that society of free people of which Augusto Sandino dreamed." Ignatiev italicises these lines himself. What he selects for emphasis is the vocabulary that assimilates the Sandinistas to the Soviet model — the vanguard, the Marxist-Leninist direction, the road to socialism. He is reading the revolution he wants back into its founding documents.
This series applies a single test to every volume, and it is worth naming plainly because it is the test that separates propaganda from analysis. The test is whether a category the book uses against its enemies can ever be turned back on the book's own side. Ask two questions of any accusation. First, is it cashed out into a specific act that could be shown not to have happened? Second, could the category, as the book itself defines it, ever apply to the author's own camp?
On the first question The Agony of a Dictatorship scores well — better than most of this series. Its charges are concrete and, in the main, refutable and true. It names the torturers, dates the massacres, prints the aid figures, quotes the American congressmen by name. This is the honest end of the Soviet spectrum: a book that does its accusing with evidence rather than with essence.
It is the second question that undoes it. The book's governing category is "dictatorship," and it fills that word with real and terrible content: a censored press the ruler literally owns, elections that are rigged when they are held at all, a political police that disappears the young, torture chambers, a single family in possession of an entire economy, a ruling group answerable to no one. Every one of these is documented against Somoza with force. And not one of them is ever, for a single sentence, permitted to swing toward the state the book is written from, or toward the state it hopes Nicaragua will become. A censored press owned by the powerful, a police that jails people for their politics, elections without choice, a narrow group in unaccountable command of everything — these were structural facts of the Soviet Union in 1979, and the book's own moral vocabulary describes them exactly. The vocabulary is simply never allowed to point east. The word "dictatorship" in this book has a compass needle that swings only one way.
The most poignant instance is not an evasion by the authors at all, but a line they transmit without hearing it. Ernesto Cardenal, describing the disappeared of Nicaragua — the bodies on the refuse heaps, the gouged eyes, the young killed only for being young — turns to the reporter and pleads: "We want the Soviet Union daily to publish exposures of the atrocities perpetrated by Somoza." "For us," he adds, "what the Soviet Union says is most important." The reader in 1980 who knew what the Soviet press did not publish — about its own camps, its own disappeared, its own silenced — feels the irony the authors could not. Cardenal was appealing, in perfect good faith, to the one great power whose defining characteristic was that it never published exposures of that kind about itself. The book records the appeal as a tribute. It is, without anyone intending it, the sharpest sentence in the volume about the limits of the tradition that produced it.
Borovik's reportage, being literary rather than analytic, sometimes comes closer to a universal standard than Ignatiev's chronicle does — and then stops short in the same way. Writing down a guerrilla's account of a massacre, he notes: "I still remember the sessions of the International Commission of Inquiry into the crimes of the Chilean military junta and know that at some time in the future all these details will be needed." The instinct is exactly right: crimes must be recorded so that they can be answered. But the commissions of inquiry that Borovik's tradition supported met to judge Pinochet and Somoza, never Kolyma. The idea that a crime against a people must one day be answered was cashed, in Soviet practice, only against the enemy's clients. A movement that explains its opponents by their guilt and its own side by its ideals has told you how it means to govern — and here, uncomfortably, that observation applies as much to the framework Ignatiev writes within as to any dictatorship he describes.
It should be said, in fairness, that on one large question the Soviet account and its critics stood together. Both denounced the American scheme the book calls "Somozaism without Somoza" — Washington's mid-crisis manoeuvre, through the Organisation of American States, to drop the dictator while keeping his National Guard, his economy and his state intact, and even to send an "inter-American" force under a peacekeeping flag. Ignatiev's pages on the OAS mediation, and on the June 1979 vote where the United States failed to win backing for intervention, are accurate and were shared, almost point for point, by the revolutionary left elsewhere. This was a real imperialist design, and the book is right to nail it.
The Fourth International — the anti-Stalinist Marxist tradition from which these introductions are written — followed the Nicaraguan revolution week by week, and stood on the same side of the barricade as Ignatiev did: for the FSLN, against Somoza and against US intervention. Its American weekly, Intercontinental Press, devoted whole issues to the war in 1979, and the contrast with the Soviet book is not one of sympathy but of where each tradition located the revolution's driving force. For Ignatiev, agency runs through organisations and programmes — the vanguard party, the Marxist-Leninist direction, the correct line arrived at after error. For Intercontinental Press it ran through the self-activity of the masses. Reporting the fall of Managua on 3 September 1979, its correspondents relayed the eyewitness Melvin Wallace: "What took place here was a popular insurrection, in the fullest political and military sense of the term." The working-class and poor districts of the eastern city rose first; people prised up the paving stones — made, as it happened, in Somoza's own cement factory — to build barricades, and improvised contact bombs and molotov cocktails because they had no other arms. Where the Soviet chronicle credits the insurrection's success to the maturing of a vanguard, the Trotskyist paper credited the poor of Managua who made weapons out of the dictator's pavement.
A reader should weigh the two together, and weigh the reply critically too. The Fourth International's enthusiasm ran ahead of events in its own way — Intercontinental Press wondered aloud whether Nicaragua might become "the second socialist revolution of the Americas," a hope the following decade would qualify. But the tradition that answered Ignatiev had one habit his did not: it went on reporting the revolution's internal life after the cameras left, including the parts that did not flatter. That is the same difference the companion volume, Secret Weapon in Africa, exposed on the terrain of Angola, where the Soviet reporter could see the enemy's violence in fine detail and had no words at all for his own side's. Here the failure is gentler, because Somoza was as bad as the book says and the American hand was as heavy; but it is the same failure. The book has an exact and unsparing name for every crime on the far side of the barricade and no name whatever for the possibility of crime on the near side.
So read The Agony of a Dictatorship for what it genuinely is: a vivid, well-sourced, first-hand record of the Somoza tyranny and of the United States' four decades of responsibility for it — a book that convicts Washington largely from Washington's own press, and that preserves the testimony of Nicaraguans who would otherwise be lost to the record. On that subject it is a real source, and better than most of what this series reprints. Read its politics — its rehabilitation of the party that stayed home, its one-way compass, its programme quoted for the words that suited Moscow — against the Fourth International's contemporaneous coverage in Intercontinental Press through the summer and autumn of 1979, which backed the same revolution and still insisted on seeing all of it. The men and women in Borovik's camp, laughing over their coffee before setting out to fight, deserved both things: the honour the book pays them, and the honesty it could not quite manage. "We only look weaker," one boy tells him at the end, "actually we're stronger." He was right, and the book is at its best when it simply lets him say so.