The Hidden Thread: Russia and South Africa in the Soviet era by Irina Filatova and Apollon Davidson (review)

Every year, dozens of books on the history of South Africa are published worldwide. Many of them are concerned with foreign influence on the origins and development of the country’s state structure, politics and culture. Great Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Portugal and China immediately come to mind. Yet few people know what a huge role one other country – the Soviet Union – played in the events that make up the history of South Africa in the twentieth century. Irina Filatova and Apollon Davidson’s book The Hidden Thread: Russia and South Africa in the Soviet era opens hitherto unknown pages documenting the relations between South Africa and Soviet Russia and offers the reader a fresh look at the recent history of these countries.

Filatova and Davidson have studied the history of South Africa for many years and have produced many books on this subject both in Russian and in English. Among these are the two-volume South Africa and the Communist International: a documentary history, and two recently published books in Russian: Russia and South Africa: three centuries of contacts (2010) and Russia and South Africa: building bridges (2012). Their most recent book is a unique study of the history of ties between South Africa and Russia. It starts in the seventeenth century, with the first mention of ‘Moscovy’ in the journal of Jan van Riebeeck, the founder of the Cape Colony, and ends in the twenty-first century, when South Africa and Russia both became members of the BRICS countries. But, of course, as is indicated by the title, the authors pay special attention to the Soviet era – from the 1917 revolution to the break-up of the USSR. Despite the fact that for most of this period there were no diplomatic relations between the two countries, it was during this time, the authors tell us, that Russia’s influence on South Africa was most significant. It is not really surprising, since the Soviet Union was right at the centre of the struggle against apartheid.

The early chapters of the book describe the reactions of South African communists to the Russian revolution. In the Soviet ideals of equality between classes, nations and races, many of them saw an ideology that was the exact opposite of the official principles of their government. On the basis of unique archival material that has only recently become available to researchers, Davidson and Filatova recount the unlikely history of the activities of the Communist International in South Africa. It will be a revelation for many readers to find out that the Communist Party of South Africa (predecessor of the present South African Communist Party) was in fact a branch of the Comintern.

The authors pay much attention to the huge and wide-ranging influence of the Soviet Union on the ANC. The official policy of the ANC and the views of many of its leaders were connected with, and even based on, Soviet ideology to a great extent. Without downplaying the ideological side of the relationship between the ANC and the USSR, the authors stress the fact that the decisive element in this relationship was Soviet military support for the ANC’s armed struggle. The ANC’s methods of waging guerrilla war, its organization and propaganda, particularly in the 1980s, were in many ways modelled on the course in military combat work that thousands of ANC fighters were taught in the Soviet Union or in Angola by Soviet military advisers. Without this influence, the kind of armed struggle that was waged in South Africa in the late 1980s would have been impossible, and the ANC would not have been able to create its image of being the main, if not the only, organization fighting apartheid inside the country.

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