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This article provides hitherto unknown information concerning the aid provided by the USSR Communist Party (CPSU) to its Chilean counterpart between 1950 and 1973. In their research, the authors managed to gain access to reserved documents which reveal the existence of a "systematic and permanent" financial relationship between the Chilean Communist Party and the Soviet CP. Although during the period examined, the Chilean Communist party was an entity with stable structures and its own indisputable and autonomous social base, this economic aid assured the systematic and long-term operation (payment of wages, rent, etc.) of a collectivity based on "professional revolutionary" cadres. This direct and regular collaboration with the Chilean Communist Party, the authors argue, was a factor in domestic Chilean politics: as well as ensuring the articulation and functioning of a party machine, it engendered in party activists a sense of belonging to a global movement.
The authors were also able to gain access to certain parts of the diaries of the Soviet Ambassadors to Chile during the Unidad Popular period, and photocopy reports on the Chilean situation prepared by Soviet political scientists. This documentary material provides an account not only of who on the Chilean political left were the interlocutors with the USSR, but also what the Chilean left’s perceptions and expectations were in relation to the USSR, and viceversa. These papers, together with photocopies accrediting hard currency contributions from the USSR to the Communist Party of Chile (signed by L. Brezhnev, B. Ponomariov, M. Suslov and other members of the Soviet leadership) are included in "Chile in the Archives of the USSR" supra in this edition of Estudios Públicos.