Russia in Africa: A Search for Continuity in a Post-Cold War Era.

• Author: Matusevich, Maxim
• Position: COMMENTARY - Essay

Introduction (1)

In the summer of 2018, three Russian journalists were ambushed and murdered in the Central African Republic (CAR). The three had traveled to the CAR in pursuit of a story on the Wagner Group, a Russian paramilitary firm, with links to the Kremlin and alleged to be involved in an ongoing civil conflict ravaging the central African nation. Over the last few years, the firm's personnel showed up in a number of conflict zones--from eastern Ukraine to Syria. Following his recent election, President Faustin-Archange Touadera of the CAR has forged close links with the Kremlin; he presently has a Russian security advisor and Russians have been reported serving in his presidential guard. (2) The Wagner Group enjoys a patronage by President Vladimir Putins close associate, the businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin. The same Prigozhin became known in the United States soon after he was sanctioned by the U.S. Department of the Treasury for his involvement in the Ukraine conflict, and especially after he had been linked to a "troll factory" company in St. Petersburg, Russia (the Internet Research Agency, Ltd.) and subsequently indicted in the United States for his role in funding and organizing the disruption to the 2016 presidential election. (3) The murdered journalists were known to have been affiliated with opposition media organizations in Russia and personally with Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a prominent exiled Putin critic and his one-time prisoner. (4) There is little indication that the truth about the murky triple murder in the CAR will come out any time soon, but the tragedy served an instant reminder of Russia's evolving role in Africa as well as an illustration of some surprising and enduring continuities between the Soviet and post-Soviet involvements on the continent.

The Russia of Vladimir Putin has been growing more confident on the international stage, seeking to reclaim or rebrand its faded superpower credentials. After years of neglect and quiet in Russian-African relations, the resurging Kremlin is once again pursuing an increasingly assertive African policy, which has seen an increase in contacts and deals, especially in the areas of military support and arms trade, as well as mineral extraction. (5) It is also significant that quite a few members of the new, post-Soviet Russian elite have backgrounds in foreign intelligence and the KGB. Probably most prominent among them is Igor Sechin, the CEO of the oil company Rosneft and a close friend and associate of Vladimir Putin, who spent part of the 1980s serving under cover at Soviet missions in Angola and Mozambique. (6) To better understand Russia's role in Africa and its attempts to reinvent itself as a serious power broker and a geopolitical contender on a par with the United States and China, one needs to examine the complexity of Russia's historical ties to the continent, with an eye on accounting for the continuities that can be traced back to the not-so-distant Soviet past.

The Soviet Union in Africa: A Different Kind of Power

The Soviets first arrived in Africa at the height of the Cold War and on the heels of African decolonization. Their goals on the continent presented an uneasy mixture of idealistic aspirations and sober Cold War pragmatism. Throughout the decades of its existence, the Soviet Union never failed to emphasize the contrast between its own ideological commitments to anti-racism and decolonization and the history of Western racism and colonialism. (7) Soviet leadership could and did claim a degree of continuity between the history of Russia in Africa (marked by the absence of Russian colonialism on the continent) and the Soviet critique of colonialism and North American racism. Some Soviet observers even alluded to the ambivalence of such categories as "white" and "European" when applied to Russia. (8) There are no reasons to doubt the sincerity of the Soviet desire to uphold African independence and thus realize the demands of Soviet anti-colonial rhetoric. At the same time, the Soviet interest in Africa was necessarily tied to the overriding concerns of Cold War geopolitical rivalries. Soviet attitudes towards independent Africa fluctuated to reflect both the changes in the general "party line," but also the vagaries of superpower competition. While the Cold War scholarship on Soviet involvement in Africa, including sub-Saharan Africa, often stressed its ideological thrust, a number of post-Cold War studies emphasized the importance the Soviets attached to the more pragmatic considerations of geopolitical and economic realism, sometimes well hidden under the shroud of the obligatory Marxist-Leninist rhetoric. (9)

On the eve of African independence and at the time of the expanding movement for equal rights in the United States, the Soviet Union sorely lacked the expertise on Africa and, beyond the customary anti-racist slogans, the country's general population remained largely ignorant of the history and nuance of race relations in the West. While Soviet writers and propagandists sought to expose the depravity of Western racism, Soviet scholarship on Africa remained parochial and burdened by ideological interpretive models (e.g., Stalin's insistence on the necessity of proletarian revolutions in the colonies) that were reflective of the prevailing party line in Moscow but hardly of local African conditions. (10) Under Stalin, any systematic study of Africa in the Soviet Union proved to be an uncertain and even risky occupation. In fact, several prominent Africanists perished in the purges, and those who survived thought it wise to channel their intellectual curiosity elsewhere. (11) In the course of the Second World War, the Soviet Union began to abandon its early internationalist ideals, resorting to conservative statism and as a result, the Soviet society grew progressively isolationist and even xenophobic. To be sure, the anti-racist and anti-colonial propaganda continued unabated, but its tone and volume were being adjusted in accordance with Soviet foreign policy objectives.

The arrival of independence in sub-Saharan Africa coincided with the liberalization of the Soviet Union under its new leader Nikita Khrushchev. After the oppressive Stalinist decades, the Soviet Union entered a period of Khrushchevian "thaw," during which the country became relatively more open to the outside world. While Stalin had remained wary of socialist transformations in the colonial world Khrushchev was brimming with hope and enthusiasm. Khrushchev heralded "the awakening of the peoples of Africa" from the same podium of the 20th Party Congress (1956) where he famously denounced Stalin's crimes. A year later, on 6 March 1957, Ghana became the first sub-Saharan African nation to gain its independence from Britain. The Soviet press devoted extensive and highly celebratory coverage to African decolonization and the government dispatched Ivan Potekhin, the doyen of African studies in the Soviet Union, to attend the First African Peoples' Conference in Accra (1958). (12)

After the decades of Stalinist isolationism, and in the wake of the 1957 Youth Festival in Moscow, the Soviets now looked for friends in the developing world where the emerging post-colonial nations seemed perfect candidates for just such a friendship. This was the point emphasized by the great pan-Africanist W.E.B. Du Bois in 1958 when he argued for the creation within the Soviet Academy of Sciences of "an institute for the study of Pan-African history, sociology, ethnography, anthropology and all cognate studies." (13) Within months, the Central Committee of the CPSU adopted, in July 1959, a special resolution provisioning the creation of a research institute of African studies (later to become known as the Africa Institute). (14) Following this, another party resolution of February 5, 1960 announced the founding of a new university to train "the national cadres for the countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America." Friendship University, also known as Lumumba University, would emerge as the flag-ship institution of higher learning, catering to the needs of...