Ten Years of the Ethiopian Revolution

A collective work of the Africa Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences, assembled out of a scientific conference held in Moscow in October 1984 for the tenth anniversary of the Ethiopian revolution.

Ten Soviet Africanists contribute chapters, each on his own subject: V. Vigand on the economic base, V. Tolstykh on industry, Georgi Galperin on the peasant associations, O. Nikolayeva on culture, Y. Sumbatyan on the armed forces, O. Dolgova on the party, with others on foreign policy and on the propagation of scientific socialism, under a framing essay by A. Gromyko as the institute's director.

What it documents is the Ethiopian state as its Soviet sponsors understood it at the height of the alignment: the land reform and the peasant associations, the literacy campaign, the building of the Workers' Party of Ethiopia in 1984, the structure of the armed forces, and the terms of Soviet economic and military support. For anyone working on the Derg, on Soviet policy in the Horn, or on the doctrine of socialist orientation in its last application, this is the insiders' account.

It is a celebration and a doctrinal showcase, and Ethiopia is presented as the model of a backward peasant country crossing to socialism while bypassing capitalism.

The text was updated well past the conference: its latest event is Mengistu's visit to the USSR of 31 October to 9 November 1985. Written with the great famine barely past and the collapse six years away and wholly unforeseen.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.