This book asks to be judged by a single standard, and states it plainly. The foreword, signed by Anatoly Gromyko, Director of the Institute of Africa of the USSR Academy of Sciences, hopes the reader "will come to appreciate the lucid and consistent nature of Soviet policy vis-à-vis Africa, that on the African continent as elsewhere the USSR does not pursue a 'conflict strategy' but is on the side of the forces working for national independence, social progress and democracy." USSR and Countries of Africa is the collective work of research workers of the Institute of Africa and other Soviet bodies, edited by E. A. Tarabrin, Dr. Sc. (Hist.), and it is a serious book — a socio-economic survey, densely factual, with a proper scholarly apparatus. It is genuinely a Progress Publishers title (the imprint appears on the title page and in the footnotes, unlike several volumes in this series misfiled under Progress), translated from a Russian original published in 1977 and, as the note "To the Reader" says, "revised and supplemented" for this 1980 English edition.
The revision matters, because the revising is where the book was tested. The 1977 Russian text was closed before the event that would put "lucid and consistent" under the most strain: the Soviet Union's reversal of alliances in the Horn of Africa in 1977–78. The supplemented English edition — its latest datable events are Mengistu Haile Mariam's 1978 visit to Moscow, the second Shaba episode of mid-1978, and a count of diplomatic relations current "by 1979" — is the version that had to narrate that reversal. It is fair, then, to date the argument to about 1979 and to read it as a book that already knew how the Ogaden war had ended.
Begin with what is true, because a great deal of it is, and because the criticism that follows means nothing if the book is treated as a tissue of inventions. It is not. The material 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, built hospitals and polyclinics in Algeria, Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia, and, by the book's account, had helped erect or were building around a hundred educational institutions across the continent and 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. None of this was an imperialist fabrication, and the Western Cold-War literature that treated African decolonisation as a Soviet plot was frequently an apology for the colonial power. When the book documents the aggression of the other side, it is largely documenting fact. South Africa did send regular troops into Angola in 1975; Namibia was under illegal South African occupation; the arms embargo and the campaign against Pretoria's nuclear programme were real; the United States and China did back the FNLA and UNITA against the MPLA. On the central Angolan question the book's own antagonist agrees with it. The contemporaneous Trotskyist review Africa in Struggle — a small mimeographed journal, priced in pence, whose subtitle is "in the whirlwind of permanent revolution" — wrote in June 1978 that the Cuban role in Angola "was progressive to the extent that it represented a defence against the South African army." Where the book records Western and South African violence, believe it.
The test the foreword invites is therefore not whether the book tells lies about imperialism. It is whether any category the book applies to imperialism is ever allowed to apply to Soviet conduct — whether "lucid and consistent" survives the one case built to break it. That case is the Horn.
The book tells the reader a great deal about Soviet involvement with Somalia. It records the Soviet-Somali Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation of 11 July 1974; the Fanole dam and hydroelectric station built under a 1975 protocol; the meat-packing complex, the fish cannery at Las Khoren, the wells drilled to irrigate pastures, the free aid against the drought. Somalia, in these pages, is a client the USSR equipped and sustained. Then, in 1977, the Soviet Union changed sides. It transferred its support, together with a Cuban expeditionary force, from Somalia to Mengistu's Ethiopia, and helped the Ethiopian army reconquer the Ogaden. The book must account for the break, and it does, in a single sentence about the aid to Somalia: "This cooperation, however, came to an end in 1977, and not through the fault of the Soviet side."
The war itself is narrated so that the Soviet Union never appears as a party to it. "In the summer of 1977 an explosive situation developed in the north-east of Africa when hostilities broke out in the eastern and southern regions of Ethiopia between the invading regular units of the Somali army and the Ethiopian forces. In contrast to the imperialists and other reactionary forces which frenziedly tried to aggravate the conflict between these two African states, the USSR, from the very outset, did its best to help Somalia and Ethiopia to reach a negotiated settlement." Somalia then "continued its aggression" and abrogated the treaty; "history shows that aggression always ends in defeat, and such was the lot of the chauvinistic circles in Somalia. On their part the USSR and other socialist countries, including Cuba, once again demonstrated their fidelity to internationalism." The Soviet Union arms one side to a decisive military victory and appears in the account only as a frustrated peacemaker; the Cuban brigades that turned the campaign are dissolved into "the socialist countries" and their "fidelity to internationalism." The word "Cuban" — the adjective, the troops — does not occur in the book at all. Neither does "Ogaden": the territory over which the war was fought is never named, so the Somali claim to it can be presented purely as "chauvinistic and expansionist feelings," with nothing at issue but Somali aggression. This is the reflexivity test in its cleanest form. The very act — foreign military intervention that decides an African war — is "aggravating the conflict" when imperialists are imagined doing it and "fidelity to internationalism" when the Soviet Union and Cuba actually do it. The category never turns inward.
The sharpest silence is a single word. "Eritrea" does not appear in this book — not once, in a hundred thousand words on the Soviet Union and Africa, including a chapter on "Socialist Ethiopia." The Eritrean war of independence — armed since the early 1960s and, by 1979, favouring the nationalists across almost the whole territory — in which the same Soviet- and Cuban-backed Ethiopian army the book celebrates was engaged in crushing a national-liberation movement led in large part by Marxists, has been made to vanish. This cannot be excused as the ordinary tunnel vision of a state that never criticises its clients, because the Soviet Union's own earlier conduct convicts the omission. Here the reply corpus is not merely an outside voice but a witness to what the book removes. Africa in Struggle, writing in June 1978 and verified against the page, records that "before the expulsion of the Russians from Somalia and the beginning of the Ogaden war, the Soviet Union proposed" a "'socialist' federation to the entire Horn with autonomy for Ogaden and Eritrea." The USSR had itself once countenanced Eritrean autonomy — when Ethiopia was an American client and Somalia was Moscow's. Once the pieces were reversed, Eritrean autonomy became unmentionable and the movement itself unnameable. The same review notes that in the late 1960s, when Ethiopia was still Washington's, it was American napalm that fell on Eritrean villages while "Cuban advisers were brought in to train" the Eritrean guerrillas. Within a decade every one of those alignments had flipped, and Cuban soldiers stood on the other side of the same war.
Africa in Struggle drew the conclusion the book exists to prevent: "This cynicism towards the class character of the state explains why it is possible for the Soviet Union to support brutal petit bourgeois regimes in Somalia and Ethiopia. Indifference to the struggle and interests of the masses in those countries means alliances can be shifted at will — yesterday's 'progressive' becomes today's 'reactionary'." Soviet policy, on this reading, was "guided by the need to extend Soviet influence: primarily political and strategic, secondarily economic," and its preferred outcome was not workers' power but "states which remain capitalist while firmly within the Soviet sphere of influence." The Cuban internationalism the book invokes had, in this account, become something else, "as the Cubans have become no more than shock troops of the Soviet Union." One need not endorse every position of a small journal — its call for the secession of both Eritrea and the Ogaden Somalis was a hard one, and it is offered here as the contemporaneous reply, not as settled doctrine — to see that it was describing something the official book had painted over. The reversal in the Horn was not an anomaly that "lucid and consistent" could absorb; it was the refutation of the phrase.
Behind the Horn stands the book's governing idea, and it is worth stating because it is the idea the whole anti-Stalinist tradition was formed to contest. The book's organising category is "socialist orientation," the "non-capitalist road": the claim that a string of newly independent states — Angola, Mozambique, Benin, the Congo, "Socialist Ethiopia," Guinea, Tanzania, Madagascar — could pass over to socialism under the leadership of "revolutionary democrats," largely military and petty-bourgeois in composition, provided they took the Soviet Union for their guide and model. This is precisely the proposition against which Africa in Struggle set permanent revolution in its very subtitle. Trotsky's second thesis in The Permanent Revolution (1930) states the counter-argument exactly: "With regard to countries with a belated bourgeois development, especially the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the theory of the permanent revolution signifies that the complete and genuine solution of their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of the subjugated nation, above all of its peasant masses." What is at stake between the two books is not sympathy for African liberation, which both share, but whether a petty-bourgeois military regime tied to Moscow constitutes the road to socialism — or a national state whose alignment can be, and in the Horn was, sold and re-sold according to the interests of the guiding power. The events the book itself narrates answer the question in the tradition's favour.
There is a small, exact emblem of the book's method, and it is a quotation. Opening its treatment of Soviet disarmament diplomacy, the book reaches for authority: "Back in 1916 Lenin in an article entitled 'The "Disarmament" Slogan' wrote: 'Disarmament is the ideal of socialism.'" The footnote is honest — Collected Works, Vol. 23, p. 95 — and the sentence is Lenin's. But it is the first sentence of a paragraph, and the paragraph goes on, in the version reprinted in our own tradition, to say the opposite of what the book wants it to mean: "But whoever expects that socialism will be achieved without a social revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat is not a socialist." Lenin's article was a polemic against putting disarmament in a socialist programme; its conclusion is "Our slogan must be: arming of the proletariat to defeat, expropriate and disarm the bourgeoisie." The book quotes the ideal and cuts before the "But," turning a warning against pacifism into a warrant for it. This is the same operation performed on the Horn, in miniature: keep the phrase that flatters the policy, drop the sentence that would embarrass it. It is a habit this whole series meets again and again — and here it happens to be Lenin's own text that is truncated.
One absence, finally, that is not a matter of doctrine but of authorship. Soviet policy in this book has no authors, only an incumbent. Brezhnev is quoted and cited some thirty-three times; his 1977 report on the anniversary of October is the book's recurring authority. Khrushchev, under whose leadership the Soviet turn toward the newly independent African states actually began — the wave of recognitions the book itself dates to 1960 — appears not once. The initiatives are attributed to "the Soviet Union," "the Soviet Government," "the Soviet delegation." Even Somalia's ruler, Siad Barre, whose government the USSR armed for years, goes unnamed while his country is discussed twenty-one times; the emperor the Ethiopian revolution overthrew, Haile Selassie, is likewise absent. A policy with a living author and no dead ones is a policy that cannot examine its own past, because its past has been depopulated. That is the deepest sense in which the foreword's "consistent" is a claim the book cannot afford to test: consistency, here, is produced by forgetting.
Read USSR and Countries of Africa for its documentary weight, which is genuine — the aid projects, the treaties, the voting records, the sheer scale of Soviet material engagement with the continent are all here, and much of it is not so fully assembled anywhere else. But read the Horn chapters beside Africa in Struggle of June 1978, and read the disarmament epigraph beside the rest of Lenin's paragraph. The book set itself a single test — whether Soviet policy was one thing everywhere, answerable to one standard — and the one African war it had to revise its pages to include is the war in which that policy changed sides, disowned its own client, unnamed the movement it had helped to crush, and called the whole of it internationalism.