A Distant Front in the Cold War: The USSR in West Africa and the Congo, 1956-1964 (review)

Soon after Iosif Stalin's death in 1953 the new Soviet leadership headed by Nikita S. Khrushchev revived Vladimir Lenin's view that the interests of the USSR and those of the anticolonial forces throughout Asia and Africa coincided and that liberation groups challenging colonial power or in charge of newly independent states were likely allies in the struggle against the capitalist West. As one of the analysts in the West who for more than a quarter of a century attempted to track and understand the intricacies of the relationships between Moscow and the emerging governments and leaders of Africa and the Third World, I find Sergey Mazov's A Distant Front in the Cold War to be a fascinating narrative, one that draws on documentary and archival materials that provide the detailed evidence concerning Soviet policy simply unavailable to analysts in the West—or in the Soviet Union itself—during the Cold War.

One surprising fact that emerges from a reading of Mazov's excellent study is the degree to which earlier analysts generally "got it right"—with one major exception, as he points out, of generally assuming that Moscow had a comprehensive strategy in place and that its initiatives, even in the first decade of involvement in Africa, were guided by that strategy. In fact, as Mazov demonstrates throughout the book, specific concrete opportunities to challenge the West and Western inflouence in Africa were the driving force in Soviet policy during the period from 1956 to 1964. Therefore, policy was much more ad hoc and reactive in nature than earlier Western analysts assumed. Moreover, African leaders had substantial inflouence over the ways Soviet policy developed and the degree to which it succeeded—or, one might note in the four cases that Mazov reviews, the reasons it failed.

Mazov provides four detailed cases studies of Soviet policy during the Khrushchev years—those of Ghana, Guinea, Mali, and Congo. (He also discusses Moscow's failed efforts to establish diplomatic relations with Liberia before its contacts with these three countries. U.S. pressure against the William Tubman government played the determining role in this failure.) In the first three countries Moscow was able to establish solid relations with the new postcolonial governments, but those relations proved to be quite fragile and heavily dependent on the vagaries of local politics and on the effective political and economic intervention of the United States and the former colonial powers. In the case of Congo the de facto control over the United Nations (UN) and its policies in Congo exercised by the United States and its allies and Moscow's dependence on Congolese actors doomed Soviet efforts to establish a strong and stable relationship. (Mazov never asserts that the United States had de facto control over the UN, but this is the conclusion that emerges from his narrative, as well as from most other assessments of the Congo crisis of the early 1960s.)

Mazov organizes his study along strictly chronological lines in chapters that each cover two to four years. This results in breaks in the narrative that Mazov could have avoided if he had organized the narrative around the major cases and not by year. Overall, however, he effectively presents his argument and the supporting evidence, which is drawn from a broad range of archival sources, not just Soviet, as well as from some of the original Western analyses.

Mazov makes several points throughout his analysis that the reader with an interest in the development of Soviet policy toward and relations with Africa in the decade that he examines will find of special interests. The first is the degree to which the success of Soviet policy hinged on political developments within the host countries and the effectiveness of the United States, in particular, in undercutting Soviet efforts. This comes across most clearly in the case of the Soviet Union...