Intermediaries of Liberation: Soviet Bureaucrats and the Cold War in Africa
Natalia Telepneva. Cold War Liberation: The Soviet Union and the Collapse of the Portuguese Empire in Africa, 1961-1975 University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, North Carolina. 2022. ISBN: 978-1469665856. $39.95 (Paperback)
In recent years, Russian operatives have once again fanned out across Africa—not as Marxist-Leninist “internationalists,” but as contractors and security advisers flying the banner of the Wagner Group and its successor formations within the so-called Africa Corps. From Bangui to Bamako, Moscow’s contemporary “men on the spot” have traded ideology for access, securing mineral concessions, military basing rights, and diplomatic leverage in exchange for regime protection. The uniforms and rhetoric have changed, but the mechanism is strikingly familiar: Mid-level Russian operatives, embedded alongside African leaders, shape policy from below and pull the Kremlin deeper into local conflicts.
Natalia Telepneva’s Cold War Liberation: The Soviet Union and the Collapse of the Portuguese Empire in Africa, 1961-1975, reveals that this dynamic is not new. During the 1960s and 1970s, Soviet internationalist bureaucrats – or mezhdunarodniki – operating in Lusophone Africa likewise translated personal relationships, ideological zeal, and bureaucratic momentum into state policy. To understand Russia’s twenty-first-century return to Africa, we must first reckon with the Cold War origins of Moscow’s “men on the ground.”
Telepneva, a lecturer of international history at the University of Strathclyde, centers the importance of ideology in Moscow’s Cold War in Africa. Marxism-Leninism served as the binding agent between revolutionary African leaders and the Soviet diplomatic, military, and intelligence personnel with whom they engaged. Ideological belief drove these mezhdunarodniki to push their superiors in Moscow to do more in Africa. “Since Africa was never among the Soviet leadership’s priorities,” Telepneva compellingly argues, “these men came to influence decisions at the top.”
While Lenin called imperialism “the highest stage of capitalism” and identified national liberation as a key weapon in the coming struggle against the global capitalists, Africa came into Moscow’s sights relatively late in the Cold War. Aside from a last-minute bid to secure territorial concessions in French North Africa at the end of the Second World War, Stalin largely ignored outreach from African revolutionaries, preferring to focus on consolidating his grip on Eastern Europe. The era of Soviet engagement with Africa would begin under his successor, Nikita Khrushchev.
Khrushchev sought to exploit decolonization and build ties with African socialist movements. This task fell on the shoulders of mid-level Soviet bureaucrats from various agencies, including the Foreign Ministry, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s (CPSU) International Department (MO), the GRU (military intelligence), and the KGB. Khrushchev’s new focus on the Third World “gave rise to a new stratum of Soviet military and bureaucratic elite with vested interests in developing relations with newly independent African nations.” However, early Soviet campaigns stumbled. Soviet efforts to provide clandestine support to left-leaning African leaders such as Congo’s Patrice Lumumba were snuffed out by the CIA. Meanwhile, major economic projects in Africa often proved divisive and counterproductive.
Outreach to African resistance movements in Portuguese-occupied areas proved more successful. African leaders like Guinea-Bissau’s Amilcar Cabral, Angola’s Augustine Neto, and Mozambique’s Samora Machel exercised their own agency through their interactions with these Soviet representatives. The mezhdunarodniki pushed their superiors to do more to support these African rebel movements. Over time, this led to a militarization of Soviet foreign policy in Africa.
The case of Angola is illustrative in this regard. Petr Manchkha, the head of the Africa section of the Soviet Solidarity Committee’s International Department, reported on June 5, 1975, that “I can say that there is a possibility of a Zairean scenario, when all of ours will be beaten” (pp. 183). With Brezhnev in declining health, action-oriented and ideological bureaucrats like Manchkha and Sergei Afanasenko, Moscow’s Ambassador in neighboring Congo Brazzaville, gained a newfound importance. As historian Sergey Radchenko wrote, “physical decline and mental paralysis at the highest levels of leadership meant that policy recommendations thought up at the lower levels of the party hierarchy suddenly turned into policy by virtue of bureaucratic inertia.”
In retrospect, Angola was a key milestone in the demise of détente. Soviet success in Angola led to newfound optimism amongst Moscow’s internationalists. Karen Brutents, the deputy head of the CPSU’s International Department, famously noted that the world “was turning in our direction” (pp. 205). Soviet cadres, Telepneva notes, “interpreted” Moscow’s victories in the Third World in the mid-1970s as “signs of U.S. structural weakness” (p. 205). Flush with confidence and driven by ideology, Moscow’s interventionism would continue in Ethiopia in 1977-1978 and Afghanistan in 1979.
However, by the mid-1980s, even the most die-hard Marxist-Leninists were becoming disenchanted by Moscow’s Third World projects amidst economic decline at home. As Anatoli Adamishin, the Deputy Foreign Minister from 1986 to 1988, noted, the economic situation at home caused leaders to “stop” and “determine which, fundamentally, are the national interests – to carry the ideals of socialism to the world, or to improve the economy of one’s own country and the welfare of the people” (pp. 207). The Kremlin sent over 3.4 billion rubles of weapons to Angola from 1976 to 1988, while Ethiopia became the second largest foreign assistance project in the history of the Soviet Union (only behind aid to Mao’s China).
Corruption and mismanagement marred efforts to build Marxism-Leninism in Angola and Ethiopia. In Angola, the ruling Dos Santos family became synonymous with corruption (Isabella dos Santos, the daughter of Angola’s long-serving second president, would become Africa’s richest woman and first female billionaire in 2014). In Ethiopia, ham-handed land reform efforts caused a devastating man-made famine which killed upwards of 1 million Ethiopians between 1983 and 1985. Ideological solidarity with Moscow led Africans to both freedom and death.
As the costs of interventions in Angola and Ethiopia piled up, many of these formerly idealistic Soviet bureaucrats soured on the prospects of socialism in Africa. As historian Odd Arne Westad wrote, “if the countries in question were not ready for socialism, then the whole basis on which Soviet policy had been erected was faulty…by supporting these regimes, the Soviet Union therefore ended up on the wrong side of history.”
Telepneva’s path-breaking work helps illuminate the Soviet “internationalists” at the taproot of these tragedies. In doing so, she reminds us that Moscow’s African engagements – past and present – have often been shaped less by grand strategy than by the convictions and calculations of men on the ground.
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