Cold War Liberation: The Soviet Union and the Collapse of the Portuguese Empire in Africa, 1961–1975. Natalia Telepneva. University of North Carolina Press, 2022.
The history of African decolonization is inherently linked with the processes, rivalries, and challenges of the global Cold War. Even those states that saw a pacific removal of colonial authority, such as Ghana or Senegal, did so under the shadow of the rivalry between the capitalist and communist states. However, the process was even more stark in Southern Africa, where the Cold War saw the contests for armed African liberation interpreted as proxy conflicts between the two ideological blocs. These wars, where African nationalists waged an armed struggle to overthrow the regimes of Rhodesia, apartheid South Africa, and the Portuguese Empire, drove Africans to source arms, training, and money from the Eastern Bloc states. In return, the United States and its allies often quietly directed diplomatic, financial, and material aid to the “white redoubt” of Southern Africa.
It has only been recently, with the opening of archives, that a more nuanced and detailed understanding of these processes has emerged. While the works of scholars including Piero Gleijeses and Odd Arne Westad have fleshed out the elite levels of these efforts, perhaps more critical to these conflicts were the relationships between the mid level administrators and diplomats who shaped and executed the policy. It is the efforts of these less well known Eastern Bloc representatives and their African allies that are now brought to light in Natalia Telepneva’s new book, which uses her expansive exploration of newly-opened archives to not only offer a more nuanced understanding of the Soviet relations with lusophone African liberation fronts but also a critical new interpretation of the later communist interventions in Angola.
Admittedly, these struggles by African nationalists against the Portuguese Empire, and often their own internal rivals, are not the most well known of the conflicts that took place under the umbrella of the Cold War. However, Telepneva has structured the work so even a newcomer to these conflicts will find her book accessible. Following a detailed introduction in which she offers a frank discussion of the work, its limitations, and its arguments, Telepneva’s book takes its course through roughly three sections. The first section introduces the key persons on both sides of Soviet-Lusophone relations. The initial chapter, “Mediators of Liberation: Nikita Khruschev, the Soviet Bureaucratic Elite, and the Cold War in Africa,” offers both a solid retelling of the early Soviet outlook on African decolonization and an unrivaled exploration of the creation of the more middle levels of the bureaucracy that actually shaped and executed Soviet African policy throughout the late 1950s through to the fall of the Soviet Union.
The second chapter, “Revolutionaries: The Portuguese Empire and the Rise of African Nationalism,” covers more well-trodden ground, exploring the evolution of the class of educated and internationally-connected African nationalists within the Portuguese Empire and their rise to the leadership of the decolonial aspirations of their organizations. With the dramatis personae of the narrative introduced, the third section is effectively the catalyst that brings these two groups formally together and accelerates the work of liberation in lusophone Africa: the Angolan Uprising in 1961.
In her third chapter Telepneva quickly traces not only the uprising and its ultimate failure, but how the shock of the attempt effectively drove forward African efforts to eject the Portuguese Empire and the Soviet initiatives to form effective relations with the emergent organizations. The third section is by far the weightiest, spanning four chapters tracing the evolution of African efforts and Soviet relations through a period of international diplomacy, armed struggle, and finally Portuguese failure and withdrawal from 1961-1974 and ending with the descent of Angola into civil war in 1974-75. The work draws to an end with a formal conclusion that both helps draw forth the most critical threads of the previous chapters and carries the narrative forward to the Soviet challenges of the 1980s and the eventual retreat of Soviet policy in Africa towards the end of the Cold War.
However, what makes this work of such value is not the overall narrative. Rather, it is the nuanced explanations Telepneva’s research has allowed to be drawn forth. Now, instead of simple narratives of visits to Moscow by nationalist leaders, Telepneva is able to explain how these figures were seen by the African-focused policymakers of the Soviet Union and how those visits were understood not just by the Africans who sought aid but the Soviets who had focused their careers on developing effective African-facing policies.
Telepneva’s mining of the archives for insight into policymakers’ perspectives offers a granularity and fidelity that heretofore has been largely missing. The sweep of that lens is comprehensive, encompassing the personal interactions of mid level administrators and the African nationalists as well as the occasional tensions between the Soviet Africa-policy institutions and the larger Soviet foreign policy apparatus. Telepneva also uses her access to these new sources to expertly clarify multiple ambiguities in our understanding of the timeline of Soviet and Eastern Bloc aid to African liberation fronts. In particular, her work offers the definitive account of the interrelationships between the efforts of the Soviets, the Cubans, and their international cooperation to aid the Marxist People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola or MPLA) in Angola—a point of contention in many narratives.
Ultimately, it is her access to and integration of the insights of the archives that make this an essential book for scholars as well as Africa-focused policymakers. It offers not only an excellent and nuanced historical exploration of Soviet-African relations during a tumultuous time, but also multiple useful insights for how policy is formed, mediated, executed, and interpreted both within and between a global power and a local partner. The work’s exploration of the interactions between actors at a personal level is something that deserves reflection as we continue in this new era of U.S. and European relations with Africa and the developing world broadly writ.
All too often it has become common for U.S. or European governments to proclaim a policy goal and vehicle towards a developing partner, not taking into account either the abilities of the personnel that need to execute it, the local partners that will be on the receiving end, or how all the interacting individuals see their relationships. This approach may occasionally allow for success, but as Telepneva’s work takes pains to show, in the long run effectively achieving successful partnerships is not the result of elite leadership meeting in capitals. Instead, it ultimately requires both regional expertise on the part of embedded personnel and firm interpersonal relationships with the actual local individuals who will be affected and involved in these efforts. Without either of these, regional partnerships rarely achieve the enduring nature or long term success that the United States and its allies long for.
Charles G. Thomas is a Professor of National Security Studies at the Air Force’s Global College of Professional Military Education. He writes and researches primarily on African military and security matters. The views expressed are the author’s alone and do not reflect those of the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.
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Header Image: Soviet Advisors Planning Missions, Angola, circa 1970 (Author Unknown).
Notes:
In format “normal”