Ten Years of the Ethiopian Revolution is a collective work of the Africa Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences, assembled out of a scientific conference "devoted to the 10th anniversary of the Ethiopian revolution and held in Moscow on October 10, 1984." Ten Soviet Africanists contribute chapters — 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, others on foreign policy and the propagation of scientific socialism — under a long unsigned introduction and a framing essay by A. Gromyko. It carries the imprint of Progress Publishers and the copyright line "© Progress Publishers 1986," and this is a genuine Progress book, not one of the volumes in this series misfiled under that house.
Date the argument, not the spine. The 1984 conference supplied the raw material, but the text was updated well past it: its latest datable event is Mengistu Haile Mariam's working visit to the USSR of 31 October–9 November 1985, and the joint communiqué of 12 November 1985. This is a book of 1985, published in 1986 — no translation lag, no earlier Russian edition standing behind it. It reads exactly as what it is: an anniversary volume written at the high-water mark of the Ethiopian regime's Soviet alignment, with the great famine barely past, the Workers' Party of Ethiopia founded the year before, and the collapse still six years away and wholly unforeseen. What it was commissioned to do is not hidden. It is a celebration, and it is a doctrinal showcase: Ethiopia is to be shown as a model of what Soviet theory called the "non-capitalist path of development," the "socialist orientation" — a backward peasant country crossing over to socialism, in the introduction's own words, "repudiating the capitalist way of development," and "Bypassing capitalism and creating prerequisites for a socialist revolution."
The organising idea is the one this whole series exists to examine, here in its late colonial dress. A national-democratic revolution completes the anti-feudal, anti-imperialist tasks; a socialist revolution is to follow, reached "bypassing capitalism"; and the guarantor of the passage is the guiding hand of the Soviet Union. The reader who has met the drafted Indochina volumes of this series will recognise the schema exactly. Kaysone Phomvihane's Revolution in Laos (Progress, 1981) sets a peasant nation of three million on "the direct transition to socialism bypassing the capitalist stage of development"; Divilkovsky and Ognetov's The Road to Victory runs the same two stages for Vietnam; and the sibling Academy of Sciences survey USSR and Countries of Africa (Progress, 1980) builds its entire case on the "non-capitalist road" for a string of "socialist-oriented" African states, "Socialist Ethiopia" among them. One doctrine, exported from Aden to Vientiane to Addis Ababa, and this book is its Ethiopian instance.
But the Ethiopian instance carries an extra scandal the others do not, and the book states it without appearing to feel it. The vanguard here is not even a workers' party. It is a committee of army officers. The revolution's leading organ, on the book's own account, is "the PMAC, made up of the progressively-minded servicemen," which "assumed military-political leadership of the revolution"; the Workers' Party of Ethiopia, founded in September 1984, is conceded to rank, "from the point of view of its social composition, political experience, maturity and ideological development," "among the vanguard revolutionary-democratic parties" — that is, it is not a workers' party at all, and the authors know it, devoting pages to explaining why it was nonetheless given the name. The book is candid enough to record that the objection was raised at the time, in the Ethiopian student debates it reports: "whether advancement towards socialism was possible under military rule." It records the question in order to dismiss it. A group of soldiers who seized power in 1974, liquidated their rivals, and then constituted a "workers' party" from above is presented as the instrument by which the Ethiopian working class will reach socialism.
This is the precise proposition against which the anti-Stalinist tradition was formed, and its answer was in print half a century before this conference met. Trotsky put the colonial case in the second thesis of The Permanent Revolution (1930) in words that read as though written against this book: "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." The quarrel is not over sympathy for Ethiopian liberation. It is over whether socialism can be administered into being from above, by a vanguard standing in for a proletariat that scarcely exists, under the tutelage of a foreign power — or whether that substitution of party for class, and of decree for struggle, produces something else entirely and calls it socialism.
The later record settled the question in the tradition's favour, and settled it brutally. The Workers' Party of Ethiopia and its Marxist-Leninist state did not survive. In May 1991 the Derg collapsed; Mengistu fled to Zimbabwe; the regime that this book presents as marching "along the road of social progress" was overthrown, and Ethiopia moved to a market economy. What "socialist orientation" produced in Ethiopia was not socialism but a decade of war, famine and mass killing, followed by a rout. The book cannot be blamed for failing to foresee 1991. It can be read against it.
An anniversary is a choice of what to remember, and this one's silences are the finding. Ten years of the Ethiopian revolution — 1974 to 1984 — contained the Red Terror, the destruction of the civilian left, the wars in Eritrea and the Ogaden, and a famine in which the regime's own policy was deeply implicated. Test the book against each.
Begin with a name that never appears. Haile Selassie is not in this book. In more than forty thousand words on the revolution that overthrew him, the emperor deposed in September 1974 — and, by every serious account, killed in his palace the following August — is referred to only as "the Emperor," and his removal is narrated in a single glacial clause: the military committee "disbanded the government and parliament and overthrew the Emperor. That paved the way to socialist orientation." A man ruled Ethiopia for forty-four years and died at the hands of the men this book celebrates; the book cannot print his name or the fact of his death. This is the erasure-of-the-ending that recurs throughout the Progress catalogue, applied here to the ancien régime it was safe to attack.
The larger erasure is of what the Derg did to the left. In 1977–78 the regime unleashed the Red Terror — a campaign of mass killing directed at the civilian Marxist opposition, above all the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Party (EPRP) and the All-Ethiopia Socialist Movement (Meison), in which tens of thousands were murdered, students and schoolchildren among them, their families sometimes made to pay for the bullets before collecting the bodies. In this book the phrase "Red Terror" does not occur. The word "terror" appears three times, and every time it is assigned to the other side: "the spread of the counterrevolutionary terror," to which "the revolutionary authorities were forced to resort to the armed suppression of the counter-revolution"; the "terrorist methods" of the counter-revolutionaries; the "counter-revolutionary acts of terrorism." The state's own name for its own killing is turned inside out and hung on its victims. The EPRP — a Marxist party of the Ethiopian left — is named exactly once, filed among "the ultra-leftists and anarchists," yoked in "a broad coalition" with "former feudal lords and monarchists." Meison, the movement the Derg first used and then destroyed, is not named at all.
Here the reply corpus is not an outside opinion but a contemporaneous witness to precisely what the book removes. The Fourth International's weekly Intercontinental Press covered the Ethiopian revolution closely from 1974 onward. On 27 February 1978 — while the killing was at its height — it reported that "hundreds of alleged supporters of the underground Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Party have been killed over the past few months in what the Dergue calls its 'red terror.'" The paper had already, on 28 March 1977, described the EPRP plainly as "an underground group opposed to the military junta." And in June 1978 it reported the suppression of Meison, whose ideologues were driven into exile or, in the case of Hailu Fida, imprisoned by the Dergue. The category the book will not turn on the regime, its own tradition applied without hesitation, in the moment, on the page.
The point is not that the book errs on a date. It is that a category never turns inward. A candid Progress volume can admit that this or that leader was mistaken; what never happens is that the label — "terror," "dictatorship" — is allowed to attach to the men in charge. The book even stages this refusal openly, dismissing "some of the Western statesmen, bourgeois sociologists and journalists" as "libellous to the point of accusing Ethiopia's revolutionary leaders of taking dictatorial and totalitarian attitudes, provoking bloodshed." The Red Terror is not answered; it is pre-emptively reclassified as slander.
On Eritrea, the book is not silent but inverted. The Eritrean movement — armed against Ethiopian rule since the early 1960s, and led in large part by the left — appears as "the Eritrean nationalists, who are clearly under the thumb of the imperialists and the reactionary Arab sheikhs," "separatist bands" bent on depriving Ethiopia of its coast. Set this beside the same Intercontinental Press, which on 20 February 1978 recalled that "In 1962, Selassie dropped all pretenses of maintaining the federation and formally annexed Eritrea as Ethiopia's fourteenth 'province.' It is in fact a colony." The war the book describes as imperialist subversion was, in the reply corpus's reading, a colonial reconquest — waged, after 1977, by an Ethiopian army newly armed and stiffened by the Soviet Union and Cuba. The book is even willing to let a corner of the truth show: its own chapter on the peasant associations notes that in Eritrea and Tigre "the normal course of life is still disturbed by the secessionists" — an admission, in passing, that a decade into the "socialist orientation" the regime did not control the north.
And on the Ogaden, the book performs the same operation as its sibling USSR and Countries of Africa, only more completely. The Somali invasion of 1977–78 is narrated at length as an "aggression" by "the Siad Barre regime," "encouraged by the West," repelled "owing to the friendly assistance from the Soviet Union, Cuba, the GDR and the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen." What is missing is that until the year before, the Soviet Union had been Somalia's patron — arming and training the very army that invaded. Intercontinental Press supplied the sentence the book cannot: Moscow "also armed and helped train the troops of the Somali regime until its advisers were expelled in November." The USSR equipped both sides of the same war within a single decade, switching clients as its strategic interest dictated; the book presents the outcome as internationalism and the reversal as though it had never occurred. (Interestingly, this 1986 volume is franker than the 1980 USSR and Countries of Africa on one count: it names the Cuban military role openly and repeatedly, where the earlier book had dissolved the Cuban brigades into "the socialist countries" and never printed the word. By 1986 the intervention was too large and too celebrated to hide.)
The hardest case is the famine, because here the book speaks — and is partly right. It acknowledges "the disastrous drought of 1984 which is followed by famine that has caused suffering to more than 7,000,000 Ethiopians," and it scores a genuine point against the old regime: "The former regime closed its eyes to the people's suffering and concealed the data illustrating the scope of drought and famine that ravaged the country in the early 1970s, when hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians died of starvation." That concealment was real, and it was one of the crimes the 1974 revolution exposed. But the book then presents the regime's response as pure relief, and slides past the policy that made the catastrophe worse. It records, as an achievement, that "Nearly 500,000 people from these districts have been resettled in Western and South Western regions where land is fertile. In 1985, another 1,250,000 people are to be resettled." This is the resettlement programme — the forced, often violent transfer of northern peasants, carried out with the army, at a cost in lives that later human-rights investigations put in the tens of thousands; it was accompanied by the "villagisation" drive and by the diversion of the state's resources to the wars in the north, and it was denounced at the time by relief agencies, Médecins Sans Frontières being expelled at the end of 1985 for saying so. The word "villagisation" does not appear; the coercion does not appear; the deaths in transit do not appear. A programme that was among the deadliest single acts of the decade is entered in the ledger as fertile land and open appeal.
Honesty requires a caution here about the reply corpus, and it cuts against easy point-scoring. On the famine, the Fourth International's press was not a reliable critic of the Ethiopian regime. Intercontinental Press in February 1985 treated the famine chiefly as "imperialism's legacy," worried that Western relief was being "used by the imperialists for political purposes, as part of their effort to discredit the Ethiopian government," and did not train its fire on the resettlement policy. The sharpest contemporaneous witnesses to that policy's coercion were the relief NGOs, not our own tradition — a fact about the limits of the reply corpus, stated plainly rather than papered over.
None of the foregoing touches the popular content of the revolution of 1974, and the criticism is worthless if it does. What happened in Ethiopia in February 1974 was the overthrow of one of the last feudal absolutisms on earth. The book is right that it began from below — "not a military coup, but an outburst of the working people's indignation," in the taxi-drivers' and teachers' strikes and the general strike of March 1974 — before the officers of the Coordinating Committee gathered its leadership into their hands. The reforms that followed were real and were popular. The land reform of March 1975 abolished landlordism at a stroke: as the book accurately says, "the land was nationalised and handed over to the peasants without redemption or compensation," the aristocracy and the church forfeited their estates, tenancy and farm-labour bondage were abolished. In a country that had been, in social structure, closer to European feudalism than almost anywhere else in Africa, this was a transformation of the lives of millions. The literacy campaign that mobilised tens of thousands of students into the countryside was substantial and internationally recognised; the exposure of the palace's concealed famine of 1973 was a real service to the truth.
On this, remarkably, the reply corpus and the book agree. Intercontinental Press, no friend of the regime, wrote in February 1985 that "the revolution and the land reform freed the peasantry from the exploitation of the old aristocracy." And Africa in Struggle, the small Trotskyist review of African liberation whose subtitle is "in the whirlwind of permanent revolution," wrote in June 1978 that "The upsurge which finally did away with Haile Selassie was not initiated by the military but by the action of the masses themselves." An introduction that convicted the 1974 revolution of the crimes of the regime that captured it would be doing tribalism, not criticism.
What that same review supplied — and what this book cannot — was the class characterisation that makes sense of everything the anniversary leaves out. Africa in Struggle judged that "The most accurate description of the Derg is Jacobin": that the officers had carried through "the democratic task of expropriation" of the feudal landed class — a radical bourgeois revolution — but that theirs was "a strange military dictatorship which tolerates (however unwillingly) organisations which call for a return to civilian rule," and that this was no road to socialism but a military-bureaucratic regime holding down, in the name of an absent working class, the very masses whose upsurge had made the revolution. That verdict was reached in 1978, from inside our own tradition, on the evidence then available. Thirteen years later the collapse of the regime confirmed it.
Read Ten Years of the Ethiopian Revolution, then, for what it documents and for what it dares not. The chapters on the land reform, the peasant associations and the literacy drive carry real information about a real transformation, and the Africa Institute's scholars knew their subject. But read the whole beside the Fourth International's press of 1974–78 and beside the fate of the regime it praises. The book set out to prove that a committee of army officers, guided by Moscow, was leading Ethiopia to socialism "bypassing capitalism." What those ten years actually held — the killing of the left the book calls counter-revolutionary terror, the colonial war it calls the crushing of separatist bands, the deadly resettlement it calls fertile land, and the emperor it cannot name — is the answer the doctrine could not survive.