Angola: o princípio do fim da União Soviética, by José Milhazes, Lisbon, Vega, 2009, 194 pp., €16.99, ISBN 9789726999287
Samora Machel, atentado ou acidente? Páginas desconhecidas das relações soviético-moçambicanas, by José Milhazes, Lisbon, Alêtheia, 2010, 124 pp., €15.00, ISBN 9789896222581
In broadly populist style, these two books address serious questions of recent southern African history: they are simultaneously useful in pointing to sources and frustratingly scrappy in analysis. Angola: o princípio do fim da União Soviética (Angola: the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union) raises the complex question of ‘Soviet expansionism’ in southern Africa. Samora Machel, atentado ou acidente? Páginas desconhecidas das relações soviético-moçambicanas (Samora Machel: an attack or an accident? Unknown pages from Soviet–Mozambican relations) revisits the debate about the causes of the crash at Mbuzini in October 1986 that killed the Mozambican president and over 30 of his entourage. A widely believed although unproven hypothesis holds that South Africa used a false navigational beacon to decoy the aircraft to its fate; an alternative view is that the Soviet pilots were incompetent, drunk, distracted, or all three. These are, of course, not mutually exclusive theories. For specialists Samora Machel is less interesting than Angola, and was probably written in haste. The author of both books, José Milhazes, is a Portuguese journalist and blogger who has lived in Moscow since the 1970s and knows Russian.
Both works have been aggressively marketed in Portugal – in window displays and airport bookstalls, for example – reflecting the national preoccupation with the loss of empire in the mid 1970s. The ideas – first, that involvement in Angola helped to precipitate the downfall of the USSR, and second, that the irresponsibility of Soviet pilots caused the death of Machel – are likely to find a welcome in some quarters in both Portugal and southern Africa. However, Milhazes' claims about the nature of Soviet involvement in southern African affairs are not fully supported by the evidence he presents. At this stage we simply do not have enough information to calculate the real cost of Soviet involvement in the Angolan wars. Similarly, Machel's death raised and continues to raise political as well as technical–aeronautical questions that must remain largely unanswered in the absence of new evidence.
Were Soviet objectives in southern Africa expansionist? ‘Expansionism’ may be understood as the policy to increase territory or the control of resources, usually by military means. That the Soviet Union was sometimes in this simple sense ‘expansionist’ is beyond dispute. Soviet incorporation of the Baltic republics and Moldova in the 1940s is one example, and there is evidence that the Soviet leadership discussed acquiring African territories in the 1930s. But it is also necessary to recognise that Soviet ‘expansionism’ was ideologically driven by a desire to realise a bright socialist future for all humankind, an outcome best achieved – of course – by pursuing Soviet national interest.
That said, South Africa's ‘Total Strategy’ in the late 1970s and 1980s was based on a representation of Soviet foreign policy objectives famously summarised in a phrase attributed to Leonid Brezhnev – ‘control of the energy resources of the Middle East and the mineral resources of southern Africa’, along with command of the Cape sea route. Had such a planned ‘Total Onslaught’ existed, it would have constituted genuine expansionism. However, the evidence that such unnuanced goals were ever defined is shaky at best, and Robert Legvold long ago demolished the provenance of Brezhnev's supposed remark to Siad Barre in Prague in 1973.
Milhazes has claimed in an interview that ‘mainly economic reasons’, connected to the ‘astronomical amounts’ spent on armaments in Angola, led to the demise of the Soviet Union. But his own evidence hardly supports the conclusion, although he may be right that the effort was wasted. In the 13-year period between 1976 and 1989, says Milhazes, the Soviets provided the Angolan government with military equipment valued at 3.7 billion roubles, or US$2.2 billion (p. 171). However, in 1990 Peter Vanneman published US estimates amounting to US$4 billion for 1977–1987, and another US$1 billion the following year – double Milhazes' total.
Milhazes' figure averages out at just over US$170 million annually, from a Soviet gross domestic product estimated at somewhere between US$1.5 and US$2.6 trillion in the 1980s – on the face of it, hardly enough to break the bank. Similarly, he claims that between 1975 and 1991 around 11,000 military personnel saw service in the Angolan theatre (p. 173), and some 2500 Soviet citizens (not all soldiers) were killed, with another 7000 wounded (p. 175). These figures seem high. The Soviet army in the mid 1980s had 5 million men under arms, and by contrast with Angola the size of the force in Afghanistan was between 80,000 and 100,000, with about 14,000 killed over the nine-year campaign.
The books are short and padded by lengthy direct quotations from Russian sources, and by the inclusion of appendices (Angola: the Nito Alves speech to the CPSU's XXV Congress in 1976, and the text of the Treaty of Friendship, also 1976; Samora Machel: Machel's speech to the CPSU's XXIV Congress in 1971, the Friendship Treaty, and speeches by Brezhnev). Each book also includes a chapter on the Comintern, an organization that shut up shop in May 1943, and which never evinced the slightest documented interest in either Angola or Mozambique.
Sometimes, in the absence of supporting evidence, Milhazes resorts to innuendo. His discussion of the death of Agostinho Neto in Moscow in 1979 relies on a statement by K.N. Brutents that ‘it was rumoured’ that Neto had a drinking problem, sourced to an undated issue of the Portuguese weekly Expresso (pp. 99–100). In Samora Machel Milhazes ignores previous work on Mbuzini in both Portuguese and English by Álvaro Marques, António Ramos, João Cabrita and David Robinson. His chapter on the actual crash presents several passages from Russian commentaries, without, however, reaching a decisive conclusion. It concludes by raising the possibility of high-level Mozambican involvement, with a rhetorical question dropped into the text with no previous discussion: ‘is it possible that one of the reasons why the mystery … remains unresolved, lies in the fact that the present President of Mozambique, Armando Guebuza, led the investigation?’ (p. 83).
Milhazes relies heavily on memoirs in Russian by soldiers and diplomats, with some research in archives such as the Arkhiv Presidenta Rossiiskoi Federatsii, which he unhelpfully abbreviates as APFR rather than APRF. The transliteration of the Cyrillic alphabet into Latin script is a tricky business, complicated by the phonetics of Portuguese. Milhazes does not seriously attempt to help his readers identify the sources, merely translating the titles of works from Russian into Portuguese. Thus the Communist Party functionary Brutents' important memoir Tridtsat' let na Staroi Ploshchadi (Thirty years in Old Square, i.e. the Central Committee offices in Moscow) becomes Trinta anos na Praça Velha. In a popular work this may be tolerable if unaccommodating, but to spell the name of Andrei Grechko (1903–1976) variously as Gretchkov, Gretchko and Gretcho in the space of a single paragraph (Angola, p. 36) is unacceptably careless. Equally sloppily, in Samora Machel the same nine-line quotation from Arkadi Glukhov about Eduardo Mondlane is repeated verbatim on both pages 38 and 40. In both books Milhazes misspells the name of the well-known Russian Africanist Valentin Gorodnov as Goronov.
Serious research in these subjects certainly requires mastery of Russian and Portuguese, but it also requires an ability to locate the topics in the context of the historiography of the Cold War and its regional manifestations in Angola and Mozambique. Unfortunately, Milhazes makes almost no attempt to do this, ignoring Angolan, Mozambican and Portuguese scholarship – let alone work in English or French – and relying entirely on Russian diplomatic and military memoirs. As a Russian-speaking Portuguese journalist, Milhazes is well-placed to pose important questions, but for non-Portuguese readers his books make a limited and largely decontextualised contribution to our knowledge of their subjects.