Perspectives on The Soviet Union and the Horn of Africa during the Cold War

Editor's Note: This forum brings together six experts on Soviet policy toward the Third World to take part in forum about a book recently published in the Harvard Cold War Studies Book Series, The Soviet Union and the Horn of Africa during the Cold War, by Radoslav A. Yordanov. The commentators discuss the significance of the book's topic, many specific episodes covered by Yordanov, and the book's strengths and shortcomings. The six commentaries are published here seriatim with a reply by Yordanov.

Commentary by Robert H. Donaldson

The international system at the end of World War II was perceived in both the United States and the Soviet Union as rigidly bipolar. In 1947, both the Truman Doctrine and Andrei Zhdanov's speech at the founding conference of the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform) portrayed a struggle between two camps, each united around its own ideology. As the European colonial empires collapsed in the postwar period, newly independent countries in Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa joined the few already independent states in those regions. Termed the "Third World," they were unwillingly cast in the role of an arena for the competition of the two blocs.

In the mid-1950s, Nikita Khrushchev revived the Leninist perception of the developing world as the "vital reserve of imperialism" and initiated a relatively low-risk Soviet challenge that sought ideological victories for "socialism" as well as strategic benefits in the economic and military spheres. The initial Soviet forays became a broader-based investment under Leonid Brezhnev, as the USSR sought to counter Western (and Chinese) influence in all areas of the Third World, establishing in the process facilities that allowed Soviet military power to be projected on a truly global basis. Soviet influence reached its high-water mark in the mid-1970s, after which the USSR lost some of its hard-won beachheads, while also failing to persuade the United States that its expansionist and revolutionary activities in the Third World were compatible with superpower détente.

Even before the end of the Cold War, problems with the Soviet economy spurred Mikhail Gorbachev to begin ending some of the USSR's most costly and unproductive Third World investments. Soviet troops were withdrawn from Afghanistan, and the USSR cooperated in arranging negotiated solutions to long-standing regional conflicts in Asia, Africa, and Central America. As the global competition ended, both the Soviet Union and the United States sharply cut back their economic and military assistance programs in these regions.

Radoslav Yordanov's book illuminates Soviet activities in the Horn of Africa during the entire postwar period. He brings to the subject, much analyzed in earlier studies, two especially valuable contributions: extensive coverage of the activities undertaken in the region by the Soviet Union's East European partners, and outstanding research in various archives containing documents pertaining to both Soviet and East European observations and efforts in the Horn.

Yordanov argues persuasively that the policies pursued by Moscow in Ethiopia and Somalia were heavily influenced by considerations of Cold War strategy and by limitations in Soviet capabilities, rather than strictly adhering to a doctrinal approach focused on the promotion of socialist revolution. He labels these competing priorities the "Comintern" and "Narkomindel" lines, harking back to Vladimir Lenin's early approaches to Soviet foreign policy. Yordanov attempts to distinguish which elements of the Cold War–era Soviet Communist Party and government bureaucracies followed which line, but the attempt (beginning on p. xxv) ultimately proves awkward and confusing—not surprisingly, given the enormous differences in the global context between the 1920s and the Cold War.

The contrast between the early post-revolutionary period, when the Russian working class had "nothing to lose but its chains," and the position of the USSR in the...