The publication in 2021 of a third volume of the ambitious document collection on Soviet/Russian relations with African countries from a group of scholars associated with the Tsentr Afrikanskikh Issledovanii (Centre of African Studies, hereafter TsAI) in Moscow is to be warmly welcomed. The book covers in 1000 pages the period from 1961 to the early 1970s, but the fact that it is in Russian will undoubtedly limit its impact among Western Africanists interested in the topic and the period. The purpose of this article is to draw attention to the characteristics and significance of the collection and to locate its production in the specific conditions of African studies in the Russian Federation. Among other things, the book will hopefully contribute to interrelated historiographical questions: what effect, if any, did the training and deployment of spetsialisty-mezhdunarodniki 1 or international relations specialists have on the development of policy; were they able to produce useful analyses; and to what extent was overall Soviet Africa policy strategically coherent.
The volume covers the 1960s and early 1970s, a period of domestic growth and social progress during which Soviet interest in African affairs reached new levels of intensity under Nikita Khrushchev, with his ‘odd mixture of romanticism and ruthless pragmatism’ (Derluguian 2005, 89). It is easy to forget that this was a period of economic growth and social progress before the lengthy levelling off and decline under Leonid Brezhnev’s extended reign. It was also the period of the Congo crisis of 1960 to 1965 and the fraught pan-Africanist debates about continental unity that led eventually to the founding of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in 1963 – as well as Algerian independence in 1962, won by armed struggle, but not covered in this volume. The collection – of 409 documents – stops short of the most dramatic events of the mid 1970s, the 25 April coup in Portugal leading to the independence of Angola and Mozambique, the revolution in Ethiopia, and the intensification of the struggle in Zimbabwe, in all of which the Soviet Union played a significant role. It is unclear whether further volumes covering the 1970s and 1980s are planned. The first two volumes in the series were published together in 1999, both focusing on much broader periods and in much less detail. The first collection of 136 texts covered the Tsarist-Imperial period from the eighteenth century until 1917 (Davidson, Viatkina, and Tsypkin 1999), while the second, containing 197 documents, covered the early Soviet years from 1918 up to 1960 (Davidson and Mazov 1999). That collection focuses on Ethiopia and South Africa, as well as on the beginnings of decolonisation and Soviet reactions to it, and also includes sections on some individual countries such as Congo and Ghana.
Several volumes of documentary materials on Soviet relations with Africa in the 1960s and later were published by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs between 1963 and 1985 under the generic title The USSR and African countries (Gromyko et al. 1963-). These consisted almost entirely of high-level and official ‘party line’ texts such as statements from Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) Congresses or speeches to the UN Security Council. However, many of the documents in this new collection are of a different character and show us, however partially, how mid-level Soviet functionaries stationed in Africa interacted with, gathered and evaluated intelligence about local events, and sometimes struggled to understand their African interlocutors.2 The editors comment drily in their introduction that ‘in the end, and on both sides, high expectations and hopes were often not realised’ (Mazov, Davidson, Balezin, and Voevodskii 2021, 25).3 This is perhaps putting it mildly. As is the usual practice in Russian historiography, the editors are reticent about their principles of selection, merely remarking that the documents, almost all previously unpublished, are only ‘on those countries with which the USSR's relations were the most important’ and are ‘the most typical and representative’ (p. 27). They might have added typical and representative of what was made available to them, since access to many archives was severely restricted.4 The period covered by this collection was one in which Soviet Africa policy – and the level of expertise underpinning it – developed significantly, first in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and later, but more slowly, after Khrushchev’s fall in 1964.
The context: African studies in Russia and the historiography of the Cold War in Africa
The book is divided into eight sections, of which the last four are devoted to geographical regions and are then further divided up by country. The North African region is excluded. The first four sections, containing 90 documents in total, deal with the main trends in cooperation between the Soviet Union and African countries; Africans in Russia; Russians in Africa; and the development of mutual relations. These sections contain documents on a wide range of general topics – trade union contacts, assistance in the health sector, youth organisations, various types of cultural exchanges, including the distribution of Soviet publications, tourism, and so on. There is information scattered throughout the book on the scale of Soviet financial aid to African countries and liberation movements. There is a short introduction by the editorial team, an index of names and a list of abbreviations. A general difficulty is the transcription into Cyrillic of African names by Soviet diplomats and others, who may sometimes have had only an imprecise idea of who they were talking to, or what organisation they represented.
The book has been compiled by a team from TsAI, an institution that was founded in 1971 under the leadership of Apollon Davidson within the Academy of Sciences’ Institute of General History, and which enjoyed a reputation for heterodoxy in the Soviet period. It should not be confused with the older and much larger Africa Institute (Institut Afriki), also part of the Academy of Sciences. In the past, many Western scholars failed to recognise the extent of diversity within what they saw as a monolithic system of Soviet research structures and so TsAI and its publications:
… are rarely mentioned in foreign studies of Soviet and post-Soviet African studies … they do not fit the stereotypes … The centre’s special quality lies in its steady opposition to dominant ideology, political trends and academic fashions … For the five decades of its existence, the centre has chosen topics and directions for its research and publications in which it could say and do something new and meaningful and has approached these topics with maximum objectivity and scientific honesty … (Filatova 2022, paragraph 8)
The ‘responsible editors’ are Mazov and Davidson, assisted by Balezin and Voevodskii and a team of another seven researchers who are listed as having worked on particular sets of documents (p. 28). Mazov appears to have done most of the heavy lifting, having selected and edited over half the documents. For Western readers, Sergei Mazov is one of the best-known of the group around Davidson and TsAI, since he has published in English and German and has engaged in historiographical debates, especially on issues around the Soviet role in the Congo crisis of 1960–1965. He has argued, for example, that Nkrumah’s behaviour during the Congo crisis was that of ‘a practical and pragmatic politician’ (Mazov 2010, 6). On the question of the USSR’s ‘grand Africa strategy’ he has commented that ‘there was no established Soviet African blueprint per se, only some drafts of it, based on flawed knowledge of the continent and its inhabitants’ (Mazov 2010, 6). He highlights the memoir of K. N. Brutents, a former deputy director of the International Department and a candidate member of the CPSU’s Central Committee, in which Brutents asks whether there was ever an African strategy, and responds that:
Only one answer is correct: unfortunately, no. The source of [Western] ideas about such a ‘strategy’ is more or less clear: the desire to ‘demonise’ the enemy, to over-rationalise his actions, to attribute greater intellectual potential to the state leadership … I have never come across a document where the least attempt was made to outline our African strategy – it did not exist. (Brutents 1998, 213)
The belief that the Cold War could be won in the Third World transformed the agenda of Soviet intelligence. In 1961, the youthful and dynamic chairman of the KGB, Aleksandr Shelepin, won Khrushchev’s support for the use of national liberation movements and other anti-imperialist forces in an aggressive new grand strategy against the ‘Main Adversary’ (the United States) in the Third World … the KGB’s grand strategy survived. It was enthusiastically embraced by Iurii Andropov from the moment he [became] KGB chairman in 1967. (Andrew 2010, 425, emphasis added)
In the late 1950s, however, in the ‘expansive and wildly optimistic atmosphere of Khrushchev’s thaw’ (Derluguian 2005, 2) the continent appeared to present ‘a world of opportunity’ for intervention, with the newly decolonised countries, many socialist in their orientation, potentially taking on a role in the near future alongside the Soviet Union in its struggle against the imperialist powers (Latham 2010, 263–264). Nikita Khrushchev, who had become First Secretary of the CPSU in 1953 and Chair of the Council of Ministers in 1958, was especially ‘enchanted and mesmerised’ by this possibility (Zubok and Pleshakov 1996, 206). In a key speech at the Higher Party School on 6 January 1961, which caused alarm in the United States (US Senate 1961), he made it clear that he regarded the moment as an historic opportunity:
… the disintegration of the system of colonial slavery under the impact of the national-liberation movement is second in historical significance only to the rise of the socialist world system … The awakening of the peoples of Africa is one of the most outstanding events of our epoch. (Khrushchev 1963, 39)
Khrushchev was peacefully removed from power in late 1964 by colleagues tired of what they saw as his individualistic and often arbitrary style of work (Namikas 2013). There was little disagreement about the general objectives of foreign policy, but rather a rejection of Khrushchev’s methods of ‘bluff, bluster and deception’ (Tompson 2014, 35). Under his successor, Leonid Brezhnev, the emphasis was on an approach characterised by ‘patience and prudence, showing little inclination for … risk-taking’ (Tompson 2014, 11). In Congo, for example, Soviet policy under Brezhnev continued as before (Namikas 2013, 212). Moreover, by the late 1960s the Soviet Union had come close to achieving military parity with the United States, and had begun to pursue policies of, on the one hand détente with the West, and on the other, extending its influence in the global South through military aid and support of liberation movements as much as through economic assistance (Tompson 2014, 36, 61). Nevertheless, Telepneva (2021, 6) has argued that rather than being ‘a product of strategic parity with the United States, the roots of Soviet involvement in Africa stretched back to the bureaucratic changes that took place under Nikita Khrushchev … ’ What were these changes?
The mezhdunarodniki and the gathering of intelligence on Africa
The Soviets had little first-hand experience of African realities. Where was such expertise to come from? Academic ‘orientalists’, including Africanists, seemed to be ‘asleep’ – in a speech at the 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956, A. J. Mikoyan, deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers:
scoffed at the Academy of Sciences’ Institute for the study of Eastern Questions which it would require (he thought) almost an Eastern earthquake to arouse from slumber. Why had the Moscow Institute of Eastern Studies, been abolished … especially now when Soviet relations were increasing with the East, economically, politically and culturally? (Owen 1956, 70)
… we know very little about many of the most important aspects of life in African countries … We have little knowledge of the complex social life of countries, sometimes … it turns out that [our] efforts were wasted … Deep knowledge of the situation, of everyday life … should play a huge role in establishing economic, social, and political ties … (pp. 29–30).
… the globalization of Soviet foreign policies after the death of Stalin, and the varying degrees of the Soviet foreign aspirations, was reflected in the institutional proliferation of Soviet foreign policy studies during the Khrushchev era … the institutional development of area-research projects has been, to a degree, reflective of distributions and re-distributions of bureaucratic power positions … (Eran 1979, 63, emphasis added)
The relationship between these institutional changes and Khrushchev’s development of an Africa policy – or at least the set of policies on African issues – was likely to have been mutually reinforcing, although ‘we know relatively little about the roles that the bureaucratic and military elite played in the conduct of Soviet policy in Africa’ (Telepneva 2021, 6). Opinion is divided about the impact they had on the policymaking process. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Party itself, and the KGB rapidly developed intelligence-gathering capacity in Africa, but academic research output on African questions remained ‘largely very weak and secondary’ (Filatova 1992, 19). A key moment in the emergence of academic African studies had been a planning meeting at the Institute of Ethnography in 1957 (Ismagilova and Iablochkov 1957, 184–186; Darch 2020, paragraph 26), but there was still little in-depth understanding of the dynamics at work. Soviet policymakers from the 1960s onwards seem to have been uninfluenced by academic research, not least because of the absence of any space for independent analysis. Indeed, ‘during the 1960s and 1970s Soviet academics were hardly ever consulted by the official bodies on political matters and did not play any role in political decision-making’ (Filatova 1992, 17). The specialist institutes in Moscow were marginal in terms of political influence – even after the fall of Khrushchev in 1964:
… during the détente years, the experts … played only a marginal role in Soviet foreign policy making. Their occasional access to Brezhnev as ‘enlightened’ speechwriters did not significantly affect the content of specific Soviet policies … they lacked the institutional-political channels for translating new ideas into policies. (Zubok 2008, 434)
… the pattern of young scholars first … establishing their scholarly credibility, and only then moving to Party or government jobs, has progressively become a more common one during the Khrushchev and post-Khrushchev regimes … the recruitment of scholars for ‘practical work’ is, at least to some extent, related to scholarly merit … there seems to have been a continuation of the old pattern of ‘round trips’ or the ‘revolving door’ – that is, of scholars who have completed certain assignments in the bureaucracy and then returned to academia … former bureaucrats are being planted in academic research institutes, and some even retain part-time positions in both the bureaucracy and academia. (Eran 1979, 125–126)
… the ability … to distinguish between correct and incorrect, relevant and irrelevant, information; second, the impact of … perceptions on assessments of the adversary; third, whether and how the relationship between intelligence services and the political leadership might lead to ‘political distortion’. (Zubok 1995, 453–454)
Nkrumah’s Ghana and the USSR: a favourite but disappointing child
In the four regionally-organised sections, the volume includes documents on 23 jurisdictions – with East Africa and the High Commission territories treated as single categories – and it is beyond the scope of a single article, as well the competence of this author, to comment in detail on such a wide range of material. The section on South Africa, for example, includes 26 documents on various topics, including the position of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), a conversation with Yusuf Dadoo (1909–1983) of the South African Communist Party (SACP), a conversation with Oliver Tambo, the question of Soviet trade with South Africa, and so on. In trying to understand the character of this collection, I propose to look more closely at what the new documentation offers in just a handful of cases – Soviet relations with Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana; involvement in the Congo-Léopoldville crisis; and the attempt to engage with early Namibian nationalism, which Soviet observers seem to have struggled to make sense of.
West African countries, especially Ghana, were a testing ground where the Soviet Union developed working relations with states about which – initially at least – little was known. Unlike Congo, in the midst of armed conflict, or Namibia, occupied by South Africa under a UN mandate and effectively inaccessible, Ghana was peaceful and had diplomatic relations with the USSR. The Africanist scholar I. I. Potekhin paid an extended research visit of more than two months to Ghana as early as 1957. Travelling more than 8000 km around the country, Potekhin later published – in a print run of 30,000 copies – a diary (1959) that was ‘the only resource [on Africa] written by a professional [Soviet] Africanist’ available to Soviet readers at that time (Mazov 2019, 204).6
The documents in this volume confirm that in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Soviet Union treated Ghana as its ‘favourite child among the independent countries of Africa’ (pp. 356–357) and gave its ‘unconditional consent to the satisfaction of any request from the Ghanaian side’ (p. 364), up until Nkrumah’s overthrow in a police-military coup in February 1966. But although Ghanaian economic policy was heavily influenced by Soviet developmentalism, this was not the case in foreign policy: relations between Ghana and the USSR were seriously damaged by ‘apparent inconsistencies and contradictions between Nkrumah’s public statements and Ghanaian actions in the Congo’ (Mazov 2018, 15–16).
Relations with the Soviet Union were not limited to economic questions or foreign policy, however. Document 102 (pp. 336–337) is a memorandum of a fascinating conversation between a Soviet official and Thomas Hodgkin (1910–1982), then director of the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana in Legon. Hodgkin – himself a pioneer of serious historical research on Africa – asked if it might be possible to send some postgraduate students from the Soviet Union to study local history and African languages in his institute for two-year periods. He also requested, not for the first time, that Dmitri Ol’derogge (1903–1987) – the ‘patriarch’ of Soviet African studies in the USSR (Davidson 2003, 55–73) – be invited for a six-month visit.
In the Nkrumah period the Soviet embassy in Accra was instrumental in pushing for a series of economic policies designed to support rapid industrialisation: these included extensive nationalisation, the establishment of state farms, and ambitious centralised planning (Mazov 2020, 619–633). Nkrumah, as a pan-Africanist, was an advocate of planning not just for Ghana but also for a future continental superstate, arguing for ‘a comprehensive economic policy for Africa which will embrace the scientific, methodical and economic planning of our ascent from present poverty into industrial greatness’ (Nkrumah 1963, 157, emphasis added). But Ghana’s seven-year development plan for 1963–1970, modelled on Soviet practice, did not produce the desired results, largely because of a failure to take local conditions into account or to estimate costs realistically (p. 365; see also Iandolo 2012, 683–704).
Taken together with the 12 documents on Ghana published in the second volume of this series, dating from January 1957 to August 1960, the 30 newly published texts tell a story of high expectations on both sides abruptly disappointed by the 1966 coup, followed by a series of pragmatic decisions between two newly wary protagonists, unable easily to disentangle themselves from earlier commitments.
Among the first documents on Ghana in the new collection are texts dealing with Nkrumah’s important 1961 trip to the Soviet Union. The Ghanaian president was impressed by a visit to a hydroelectric project, which he described as ‘a great achievement of Soviet science and technology’, adding that it was ‘thanks to the unity, determination, discipline and organisation of the Soviet people, led by the great Communist Party’ and promising that he would ‘Leninise’ Africa as soon as possible (doc. 93, pp. 314–315). He was presumably aware that this was likely what his hosts wanted to hear. He was also shown a machine tool plant, as well as other factories and construction projects.
Khrushchev, with the benefit of hindsight, wrote later that he had met Nkrumah several times, but that the Ghanaian remained hesitant, despite becoming:
… more and more imbued with confidence in the Soviet Union and its leadership. From personal conversations it was possible to conclude that in the future he would have undertaken to declare that Ghana was choosing the socialist path … (Khrushchev 2007, 882)
Nkrumah – ever the pan-Africanist – also reportedly commented that ‘the Soviet model for creating a single union in Africa is more acceptable to Ghana than the American one’ (p. 317). Regarding the elimination of the influence of foreign capital, a Soviet official reported that:
Nkrumah intends to develop a new programme for the development of the country … the elimination of the country's dependence on foreign capital [is] the main task at this stage. Drastic measures will be taken to oust foreign companies from the country. Nkrumah will immediately create a number of new national organisations in charge of various industries. The new economic plan will be developed primarily on the basis of the experience of the USSR … (p. 318, emphasis added)
… decisive for the situation in Africa, which will be of increasing importance in the future. According to Nkrumah, the example of Ghana for Africa can be compared with the example of the Soviet Union for the people’s democracies. (p. 319)
The amount of information gathered by the mezhdunarodniki is impressive, but these documents give the reader limited confidence in the ability of the Soviet diplomats to make coherent sense of it all. It is only in an analysis written in May 1967, after Nkrumah’s fall, on the shortcomings of Soviet economic policy in Ghana that we read blunt criticism of earlier intelligence:
… there were very serious shortcomings, which were permitted through faults on both the Ghanaian and Soviet sides … without comprehensive analysis and sufficient motivation … a senseless waste of funds … insufficient feasibility studies … additional expensive work that required considerable time … (p. 365)
It is not surprising to learn that the February coup was not only blamed on ‘pro-English-minded senior officers, whose position in the army was becoming precarious’, encouraged by British intelligence which ‘played an active role in the preparation of the coup’ in defence of British economic interests (p. 361). More significantly, we read that the coup ‘came as a surprise’ to the embassy in Accra, which had reported shortly beforehand that although there were domestic tensions, Nkrumah was in control of the situation (p. 356). If a key function of evaluative intelligence gathering is to predict likely near future political outcomes then despite collecting quantities of data, the mezhdunarodniki in Accra seem in this case to have missed the mark.
The first African hot spot: the Congo crisis, 1960 to 1965
The new collection adds 30 new texts dated between January 1961 and March 1966 to the already publicly available documentation on Soviet reactions to – and what we now know was a considerable level of involvement in – the Congo crisis of 1960 to 1965. The texts were identified and edited by Sergei Mazov (p. 28), who has written extensively on the Soviet Union and the Congo crisis in Russian, English and German. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs volumes present the official Soviet position on events in the Congo, but much of this new material is significantly less formal in character, as was the case with the Congo texts in the second volume in this series, published in 1999. That collection included 12 documents dated between April 1959 and December 1960 – ‘informational messages, analytical reports and notes, memos of conversations, and other “products” of the Soviet embassy in the Congo and the African departments of the USSR Foreign Ministry’ (Mazov 2015, 5). The new selection is of similar material, made from a far from perfect archival base – ‘staff at the Soviet Embassy in the Congo had to destroy documents twice’, once in September 1960, when Mobutu expelled Soviet diplomats, and again in November 1963 (Mazov 2015, 7). Additionally, as recently as 2015, documents from the Soviet mission to Antoine Gizenga’s government in Stanleyville (now Kisangani) in 1961 had not been declassified. Nevertheless, the first text is a telegram dated 4 January 1961 from Gizenga, then prime minister, to Khrushchev requesting Soviet military support: ‘On behalf of the Congolese people, I ask for your direct and immediate military intervention’ (p. 728).7
At least one of the documents reveals serious risk-taking by several journalists from the socialist bloc. Document 303 (pp. 739–745) is a Russian translation of a detailed report datelined Prague, 6 March 1961, by the Czech journalist Dušan Provaznik on an adventurous 30-day visit to Gizenga’s Stanleyville capital by a group of Eastern bloc journalists (see Kapuściński 1986; Domosławski 2012), including the Polish reporter Ryszard Kapuściński (1932–2007), subsequently well-known in the West for his journals about visits to Third World hot spots all over Africa and beyond. The group, which included Jarda Bouček and Mirek Vesely, entered by crossing the border from Sudan, but did not leave Stanleyville once they had arrived there on 1 February 1961. They were subsequently joined by a Russian TASS correspondent, Fediashin. The Czech document offers a detailed assessment of the situation in sections on politics and the economy, concluding that although there was no threat of famine (p. 742), and there was broad popular support for the government, nevertheless ‘the situation of the Gizenga Government is deteriorating and there is a need to act immediately’ (p. 743). Gizenga was still waiting for the arrival of diplomatic missions from socialist bloc countries and was unable to pay his soldiers. The whole group eventually left for Bujumbura in neighbouring Ruanda-Urundi on 27 February, where they were harassed by the Belgian colonial authorities (p. 745).
The historiography of Soviet involvement in the Congo crisis has changed over time, although it is still seen as a defeat for Soviet policy, ‘one of the lost battles of the Cold War’ (Mazov 2015, 12). Khrushchev’s memoirs, recorded semi-clandestinely in the 1970s and published in the West against the wishes of the Soviet government, pass quickly over the subject before turning to other topics:
… this was a time of intense struggle in the Congo … By all possible means we were supporting Lumumba and his party and all those who were rising up in struggle against the Belgian colonizers … A lot of time has passed since then, and I can’t reconstruct all the details of that situation in my memory, but I remember we did everything we could to support the revolutionary forces in the Congo. (Khrushchev 2007, 262–263)8
… no comprehensive study has been done on the Soviet policy in the Congo in 1960–65 … Soviet historiography can hardly be considered a substantial supplement to the efforts of Western researchers, since it – as all Soviet writing – was strongly limited by the bounds of official propaganda … Moscow’s side … remains poorly documented, and the Congo crisis is still to this day an unexplored hot spot of the Cold War in Africa when it comes to Soviet motives, intentions and behaviour. (Mazov 2007, 425–426)
These newly published documents add quite a lot to this spotty picture: they include conversations with Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Indian ambassador in Moscow (docs. 297 and 296), material about attempts to support the Gizenga government economically and otherwise (docs. 299, 302, 307), comments on the murder of Lumumba (docs. 300, 304), and conversations with the Tanzanians Oscar Kambona and Rashidi Kawawa as well as others on the ‘rebel movement in the eastern Congo’ (docs. 318–324) – the so-called Simba or Orientale revolt of 1963–1965.
Out of their depth? The mezhdunarodniki on Namibia, 1962–1966
For whatever reasons, Soviet involvement in the early phases of the lengthy Namibian independence struggle is poorly documented, with almost nothing on interactions with the Soviet Union in the memoirs of Namibian freedom fighters – there is also little secondary literature on the subject, even in Russian (Saunders 2019, 58). Even the wider historical literature on Namibia in Russian is not extensive: A. S. Balezin has published some articles on nineteenth-century topics, and some years ago co-authored a general history of the country which devoted several pages to an outline of the politics of the South West Africa National Union (SWANU) versus the South West Africa People's Organisation (SWAPO) in the 1960s, and to the ‘formation of SWAPO, the transition to armed struggle, and the beginning of the politicisation of the population’ between 1960 and 1971 (Balezin, Pritvorov, and Slipchenko 1993, 125–136). The most accessible account on the question is the section in Vladimir Shubin’s book The ‘Hot’ Cold War (2008).
The new collection includes 12 documents relating to the early development of the liberation struggle in Namibia (South West Africa or SWA), from the four-year period between January 1962 and April 1966, chosen and edited by A. V. Voevodskii (p. 28), the youngest of the four editors and a specialist in South African history who holds posts both at TsAI and the HSE University in Moscow. The documents include memoranda of conversations in Cairo and at the UN, requests for money, a description of Soviet participation in the Oxford conference on Namibia in March 1966 (where sanctions against South Africa were discussed), and a long report on a visit to Moscow by Namibian journalists based in Cairo. Namibian ambivalence regarding the necessity of armed struggle emerges clearly from the documents: as Balezin and his co-authors remarked 30 years ago ‘ … it cannot be said that a consciousness of the inevitability of armed struggle quickly and irrevocably took possession of the minds of all Namibians … since the majority of them are Christians’ (Balezin, Pritvorov, and Slipchenko 1993, 126).
The collection and evaluation of intelligence on the Namibian movements proved to be a difficult task for Soviet functionaries in the early and mid 1960s. Initially, they were politically much more sympathetic to SWANU than to SWAPO. As Shubin explains:
… in the beginning in the USSR, just as in Africa and in the West, supporters of the liberation struggle gave rather more priority to … SWANU … SWANU was a member of AAPSO [Afro-Asian People's Solidarity Organisation], and its headquarters in Cairo as well as various conferences were an important gateway for the establishment of Moscow’s contacts … from the moment of its inception SWANU portrayed itself as a national organisation … (Shubin 2008, 195)
The first interactions with SWAPO representatives described here reveal what must have been seen as a disturbing willingness to wash dirty linen in public. In January 1962, a report was sent from the embassy in Cairo, an important Soviet centre for collecting information because of the presence of AAPSO headquarters in the city. It observed that although there were no representatives of SWA nationalist groups at all in Egypt, and the author had not been able to obtain any publications either, he had been able to pick up some information ‘from conversations with Africans’:
… there is no unity in the leadership, primarily because of personal ambition … Mburumba Kerina, a member of the executive committee of SWAPO, is better educated than other leading figures … and tries to exert a decisive influence on the party line … Kerina has not been in SWA since 1952 … he has a certain influence on some SWAPO leaders, in particular on Secretary General [Ismail] Fortune … Africans in Cairo consider [Sam] Nujoma and [Louis] Nelengani to be the real patriots … and Kerina and Fortune as careerists … The Soviet representative in the Permanent Secretariat of the Afro-Asian Solidarity Organisation … had several meetings with Kerina and Fortune and had the impression that they were political intriguers … (pp. 878–879)
A couple of months later, in March 1962, Ismail Fortune met with a member of the Soviet delegation at the UN in New York, who then sent a memo of the conversation back to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Moscow. It is hard to imagine that it was well received. The lack of unity in the leadership already reported was brutally exposed as Fortune proceeded to condemn Kerina – then living in the United States – in sweeping terms:
… he seeks by all means to concentrate maximum power in his own hands … he does not allow intra-organisational democracy … He is intolerant of the opinions of others, hinders the initiative of members of the organisation, steals ideas and passes them off as his own, goes to great lengths to discredit those members who are dissatisfied with his methods of work and stand in his way … Kerina alone manages the funds of the centre in New York and does not report to anyone … (p. 880)
The same month, Mzwandile ‘Mzwai’ Piliso from the African National Congress (ANC),11 who was the representative at AAPSO of the short-lived South African United Front (the ANC, the PAC, the South African Indian Congress and SWANU), visited the second secretary of the Cairo embassy, together with Hugo Kandji of SWANU. Kandji, reported the Soviet diplomat, had given up his studies in East Germany (the GDR) in order to become the SWANU representative in Egypt. He reported that SWANU’s strategy was to get the UN to establish ‘international trusteeship … as a first step towards achieving complete independence’ (p. 882). The realisation of this objective depended inter alia on ‘the unification of the actions of all the nationalist forces of Southwest Africa and South Africa’ (p. 882). Differences between SWANU and SWAPO, Kandji asserted, were a result of ‘the personal ambition of their leaders’, especially Kerina, who ‘pretended to be the chairperson of SWAPO’, was financially well-off, and had ‘sold out to the Americans’.
Despite these inauspicious reports concerning the SWAPO leadership, Nelengani apparently made a good impression during his stay in the USSR, as a conscientious student and a convinced Marxist-Leninist. Document no. 363, a spravka or officially verified reference report, written at the end of August 1962 from the Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee to the Central Committee of the CPSU, perhaps marks the beginning of a slight warming of Soviet attitudes towards SWAPO, or possibly a hedging of bets. It recommends that:
… given the friendly attitude of the SWAPO leadership towards the Soviet Union, as well as the anti-imperialist orientation of the party's activities, it seems appropriate to consolidate the established good relations with the leaders of SWAPO and provide a small financial assistance to the vice-president of the party, Nelengani. (p. 884)12
Two SWANU journalists working on the movement’s periodical, Freedom, visited Moscow in May 1963, and the Soviet tourism agency Intourist hosted them, subsequently submitting a detailed report on their activities and conversations to the CPSU Central Committee. The journalists confirmed SWANU’s commitment to Marxism-Leninism as ‘the main ideological and political weapon’ (p. 885) but pointed out that because the level of economic development was low and the population was overwhelmingly illiterate, ‘SWANU acted as a purely nationalist organisation and would do so until the country achieved independence’ (p. 885). Many militants were in exile, and Freedom, produced in Cairo, was ineffective and did not reach the masses. The two repeated the story of the failed attempt to achieve the unification of SWANU and SWAPO, laying the blame squarely with Kerina, who was ‘associated with the US State Department’ (p. 886).
Soviet diplomats remained generally unimpressed with SWAPO: the embassy in Dar es Salaam was ‘not particularly enthusiastic’ about the movement and suggested limiting support to scholarships to the Komsomol school. SWAPO’s military plans were seen as ‘hardly realistic’ and the leadership as ‘immature’ (Shubin 2008, 197). The one document in the new collection that reports an actual conversation between a Soviet official and Sam Nujoma is devoted to a discussion of the relatively trivial difficulties of petrol rationing in Zambia, with a request for two Land Rovers to move SWAPO cadres around the country (doc. 367, p. 892). Shubin argues that this cautious attitude perhaps began to change when SWANU started to adopt a pro-Chinese position, leading to a souring of relations with the USSR and opening up an opportunity for SWAPO.
The last document in the section on Namibia is a report of a conversation at the UN between a Soviet official and Kerina, still apparently able to command attention and this time representing SWANUF, an uneasy coalition of SWANU and NUDO (the National Unity Democratic Organisation, founded by Kerina and Hosea Kutako in 1965). Kerina announced that SWANUF proposed ‘to create a provisional government that would operate not in exile, but on the territory of the country, and also that the Front [i.e. SWANUF] was engaged in training military and ideological personnel’ (p. 898). He claimed that the veteran Herero leader Hosea Kutako, who was then 94 years old, was an active member of SWANUF and ‘the only military leader currently operating underground in the territory of SWA’ (p. 899). Kerina also claimed that the United States had bribed ‘leading figures in independent African countries and even some African representatives at the UN so that they spread a good opinion about SWAPO … [but] SWAPO was losing influence in SWA’ (p. 898). The Soviet official, Shakhov, an advisor to the UN mission, closed the conversation noncommittally by promising ‘to bring the content of this conversation to the attention of Moscow’ (p. 899).
Conclusion
Soviet involvement in African affairs has often been seen through the lens of ‘a binary understanding of power in international society’ (Telepneva 2021, 3). In his influential revisionist account of the Cold War, published in 2007, however, Odd Arne Westad argues that the Cold War was not really a Eurocentric struggle between two superpowers, but was rather organically ‘connected to political and social development in the Third World’ (Westad 2007, 396), a perspective that this volume does much, directly and indirectly, to validate.
There are some silences; many archives have remained closed or, worse, have been shut down after earlier scholars have had access. Mineral wealth is not an overt preoccupation of these particular actors – copper is never mentioned and uranium only once, when the Congolese politician Bernardin Mungul Diaka (1933–1999) observes, in May 1962, that negotiations with Tshombe to end the Katanga secession were unlikely to succeed, because ‘Western countries are … afraid that … [Cyrille] Adoula will sell uranium to the Russians’ (p. 758).
It seems likely in the context of the current tragic conflict between Russia and Ukraine that Western scholars may not have access to Russian archives for the foreseeable future, for various reasons. Russian scholars themselves are facing new difficulties on top of the old ones. Nevertheless, what these documents do offer us, in all their wonderfully messy detail, is an opportunity to begin to analyse how Soviet functionaries struggled to understand what was happening before their eyes in African countries, and how they attempted, with varying degrees of success, to bring that understanding to the attention of their political masters in Moscow.