USSR and Countries of Africa

A collective survey by research workers of the Institute of Africa of the USSR Academy of Sciences and other Soviet bodies, edited by E. A. Tarabrin, with a foreword by Anatoly Gromyko as the institute's director. It is a serious book: a socio-economic survey, densely factual, with a proper scholarly apparatus.

Much of the record it documents was real and often decisive. Soviet engineers built the Aswan High Dam and the El Hadjar iron and steel works, Algeria's first. Soviet organisations sank wells in the Sahel and built hospitals and polyclinics in Algeria, Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia; by the book's account they had helped erect or were building around a hundred educational institutions across the continent and had trained tens of thousands of specialists. The Soviet Union armed and backed the liberation movements that won - the MPLA in Angola, FRELIMO in Mozambique, the PAIGC in Guinea-Bissau, SWAPO in Namibia. And when the book documents the other side's aggression it is largely documenting fact: South Africa did send regular troops into Angola in 1975, and Namibia was held illegally.

As a country-by-country account of Soviet economic, technical, military and educational engagement with Africa, compiled by the institute that advised on it, there is no comparable source in English.

The Russian original is of 1977; this English edition is revised and supplemented, with events running to 1979 - which means it is the version that had to narrate the reversal of alliances in the Horn.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.