Soviet intelligence gathering in Africa in the 1960s and early 1970s: a review article

ABSTRACT

The wave of independence in Africa in the late 1950s and early 1960s, combined with the ‘thaw’ after Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, resulted in renewed Soviet interest after two decades of ignoring African affairs. Newly established diplomatic relations with liberation movements and independent states required the rapid training of middle-level cadres who could report back accurately to Moscow, as the USSR struggled to limit US and European influence in Africa. A volume in Russian of over 400 documents from the 1960s and early 1970s excludes the Arabic-speaking north, but allows readers to understand how intelligence was gathered on the ground by Soviet functionaries attempting to interpret local politics for power centres at home. This review article focuses on the political context in which African expertise was acquired, and analyses three cases from the volume – Ghana, Congo-Léopoldville in crisis, and Namibia in the early struggle for liberation.

KEYWORDS:

• USSR; Nikita Khrushchev; Soviet–African relations; Soviet African studies; Namibia; Congo crisis 1960–1965
• Ghana

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Ray Bush, Renfrew Christie, Gary Littlejohn, Chris Saunders and Leo Zeilig for their comments and support during the writing of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 I follow some other analysts in applying the terms mezhdunarodniki and spetsialisty-mezhdunarodniki broadly to cover state functionaries and CPSU officials as well as other categories of specialists; this seems to be a new usage.

2 I use ‘intelligence’ to mean information or data that has been at least partially processed or evaluated; what these documents allow us to glimpse is the process of evaluation itself.

3 Hereafter, all simple page references in parentheses (e.g. ‘p. 12’) refer to this volume.

4 For instance, access to important documentation on contacts between the Soviet Embassy in Lusaka and the ANC was refused.

5 For an historical account of the development of ‘foreign policy studies’ in the Soviet Union from the 1920s until the Khrushchev period, with the Institute of World Economy and World Politics (IMEMO) taking a dominant role, see Eran (1979, 31–59).

6 On Potekhin’s time in Ghana, see also documents 111 and 112 in Davidson and Mazov (1999, 197–199).

7 On the archival situation, see Mazov (2007, 18–27) and Mazov (2015, 7), among others.

8 Although it is not clear which edition he is referring to, Mazov appears to be mistaken when he states that ‘Khrushchev did not write a word about [Congo] in his memoirs’ (2015, 12).

9 See, for example, Ruth First’s comments on SWANU’s rejection of the ‘reformist approach in the struggle for liberation’ (1963, 203–204). On SWAPO’s early closeness to North Korea and China rather than the USSR, see Saunders (2019, 58–62).

10 For a 16-page anonymous and critical assessment of Kerina, who was born William Eric Getzen of mixed Ovambo, Herero and European descent, see Unsigned (1966).

11 For a Russian assessment of Piliso, who was also an important figure in SACP, see Shubin (2012, 255–274).

12 In September 1962, while Nelengani was studying at the Central Komsomol School, his wife died, and the Soviets sent £50 to his elderly mother to look after his two young daughters (see docs 362 and 364, pp. 883–884). However, like Fortune, he subsequently abandoned SWAPO and returned to SWA.

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Colin Darch

Colin Darch is an honorary researcher at the University of Cape Town, honorary fellow of the Human Sciences Research Council in Cape Town, and a Pesquisador associado in African Studies at the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco in Brazil. His most recent books are Nestor Makhno and rural anarchism in Ukraine, 1917–1921 (Pluto Press, 2020) and, co-authored with Amélia Souto, A dictionary of Mozambican history and society (HSRC Press, 2022).