The ACCTU's Experience of Interaction with the Peruvian Trade Union Movement (1968-1980)

Currently, there is considerable interest in the problem of states using socio-political organizations to promote their interests in international relations. Active interaction of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions (ACCTU) with the Peruvian trade union movement in 1968-1980 is a vivid example of such activity within the framework of the process of development of Soviet-Peruvian relations after the military coup of 1968 and the intensification of Peruvian foreign policy contacts outside the Western Hemisphere.

It is important to note that the problem of interaction of Soviet socio-political organizations (including the ACCTU) with Peru has hardly been considered in the existing historiography, so the presentation is devoted to a barely studied issue, concerning a previously practically unexplored aspect of the history of Soviet-Peruvian relations.

The work is based on the principle of historicism and on the theoretical framework of the so-called "new history of the Cold War", which involves studying the components of the Cold War that go beyond the traditional emphasis on Soviet-American relations, as well as recognition by the researcher of the agency of states that did not occupy leading positions in international relations and of non-governmental organizations.

The study, based on a wide database of records of the ACCTU and documents of the Central Committee of the CPSU, demonstrates the active participation of the ACCTU in the formation and development of the General Confederation of Workers of Peru (CGTP), controlled by the pro-Soviet Peruvian Communist Party (PCP), as the main political instrument of the PCP. The Soviet side trained the CGTP's activists and provided material support to the CGTP and its individual member organizations as an entity that actively developed relations between the Peruvian labor movement and the USSR and at the same time supported the USSR-friendly governments of H.F. Velasco Alvarado and F. Morales Bermúdez. Nevertheless, despite the support of the ACCTU, due to the socio-economic crisis in Peru in the second half of the 1970s, the moderate position of the PCP and the CGTP towards the Peruvian government led to the organizational paralysis and split of the CGTP. The crisis and collapse of the CGTP demonstrated the greater importance of intra-Peruvian political processes, rather than Soviet efforts, for the development of Soviet-Peruvian relations through the interaction of socio-political organizations.