The world that went to pieces at the end of the 1980s was the world shaped by the impact of the Russian Revolution of 1917. (Hobsbawm 1996, 6)
On history
There is little doubt that the far-reaching, global consequences of the Russian Revolution affected Africa to a much greater degree than any other continent. Nevertheless, the 100th anniversary of this epic event went largely unnoticed there. This is mainly due to Africa’s demographics. With almost 60% of its population under the age of 25, the overwhelming majority of young Africans were born at a time when even the Soviet Union – as well as the so-called Eastern Bloc – was no longer present in world politics, and few of the so-called communist countries were still recognisable on the world map. But when these young Africans look at a map of the African continent today they find 55 largely different nation-states, most of which owe their existence to a long-lasting process of decolonisation that would never have happened the way it did without the existence and influence of the Soviet Union and the countries of the Eastern Bloc. Long before the imperialist colonial system broke down, long before the post-colonial history of Africa really began, the Russian Revolution had already created a global balance of forces which positively impacted on the process of decolonisation and generated a favourable framework for (national) development. The challenge of development, in its often underestimated complexity, became the mantra of a whole era that started in 1917; it not only pulled the Soviet Union and the countries of the Eastern Bloc into the vortex of change, but bound these countries together with the newly emerging post-colonial nation-states of Asia and Africa, as well as the marginalised nations of Latin America, through almost the entire 20th century.
Undeniably, the seizure of power by a vanguard party of ‘professional revolutionaries’, the Bolsheviks, and the creation of Workers’ and Peasants’ Councils that started to govern such a huge country as Russia, sent shock waves all over the planet (see, for example, John Reed’s epic book, Ten days that shook the world, first published in 1919). However, the immediate impact of the Russian Revolution in different corners of the world should not be overestimated. Although the Second Congress of the newly founded Third International had already raised the debate on national liberation and ‘national and colonial questions’ (see Lenin 1965 (1920)), these discussions mainly focused on the ‘peoples of the East’, i.e. peoples and ethnic groups already colonised under tsarist rule in the Asian regions of Russia or living in neighbouring countries of post-revolutionary Russia (later the Soviet Union, which was officially founded on 30 December 1922).
But at a global level, a few regions, notably in Latin America, witnessed a remarkable upsurge of anti-imperialist or anti-colonial struggles immediately after the Revolution. While sub-Saharan colonial Africa remained largely untouched, an exception to this was the South African Union, where the labour movement became markedly stronger and more powerful. Mass strike actions and protests eventually gave birth in 1921 to the first – and for many years only – non-racist political party in the country, the Communist Party of South Africa.
Concerning the causes underlying the wide range of strikes, peasant rebellions and other forms of mass protests that took place against colonial rule in general, and oppressive working conditions in particular, the existence of the Soviet Union – and thus the existence of an institutionalised alternative to capitalism – may have played some role; but tangible, causal links between them cannot be proven. At that time, in the years immediately after the revolution, the most decisive impact on almost all forms of anti-colonial resistance in nearly all regions of the colonised world was triggered by the world economic crisis of 1929 to 1932. This shattering event can be seen as the very beginning of political and social anti-colonial unrest inside the colonies that in many cases led to the formation of eventually successful liberation movements:
For the first time the interests of dependent and metropolitan economies clashed visibly, if only because the prices of primary goods, on which the Third World depended, collapsed so much more dramatically than those of the manufactured goods which they bought from the West. (Hobsbawm 1996, 213)
This oppressive form of accelerated industrialisation at all costs laid the basis for the Soviet Union’s later victory over Fascist Germany under Hitler’s rule, and its rise to ‘superpower’ status in the Cold War era that followed the World War II after 1946. The success of the Soviet Union’s industrialisation strategy was based on three very particular conditions: first, the size alone of the country, with its enormous natural and human resources; second, its dictatorial political leadership bent on using virtually all means available to achieve its ends; third, its closing of the narrow technological gap by establishing a highly developed network of scientific research institutions and enforcing a major increase in quantitative output of industrial pre-products (such as steel, coal and electricity).
During the period of enforced industrialisation, however, the Soviet Union remained isolated, beset by political intrigues, show trials and the cult of personalities. The new country showed little presence in either world economics or politics, and the anti-colonial movements of that period were left to themselves. This changed only after World War II and the ensuing Cold War. One major result of World War II was that the Soviet Union was now no longer the only socialist state in the world; under the decisive influence of the victorious Soviet Union, a group of socialist states emerged around the Soviet borders in eastern and south-east Europe, including the part of Germany that became the German Democratic Republic after its leaders declared national sovereignty in 1949. Finally, with the successful Chinese Revolution under Mao Tse Tung, the question of different socio-economic development scenarios in different countries and regions was firmly placed on the agenda of world politics. As Patnaik observed (2017), ‘The end of the war saw a great advance of Communist rule; an assertiveness of the working class in the advanced capitalist countries … and an unprecedented restiveness among the people of the colonies, semi-colonies, and dependencies.’ In the early 1950s, the emerging ‘socialist camp’ was not (yet) in a position to contribute decisively in cash or kind to the liberation struggle from imperialist colonial rule, but the political and economic model of economic planning and centralised political powers served already as a guiding light for a whole generation of upcoming political leaders not only in Africa, but everywhere in the Global South – and this for an astonishingly long period of time.
On geo-politics
It was some 30 years after the glorious Russian Revolution that its outcomes shaped the political dispensation of the world for the rest of the 20th century. This enduring dispensation took the form of a mega-conflict between ‘East’ and ‘West’ that influenced virtually all global political processes and decisions in this era. The conflict as such was perceived as the confrontation of two mighty groups of nation-states that followed principally different development models and aimed at achieving global dominance by all means. Thus, the military factor – in the form of a ‘balance of terror’ and the permanent threat of nuclear overkill – became a decisive element in this dispensation, and became known as the Cold War. The more or less peaceful coexistence of antagonistic camps was to a large extent founded on the undoubted mutual ability to wipe each other out.
Yet, the interpretation of the nature of the East–West Conflict differed remarkably in the two antagonistic camps. In the view of Marxist-Leninists of the Eastern Bloc – comprising the Soviet Union, East European socialist countries and post-revolutionary China, one-third of the global population – world history had entered a new phase: the period of worldwide transition from capitalism to socialism, and later communism. Seen from the perspective that the history of humanity takes place in the form of the accession of successive socio-economic formations, the transition from capitalism to socialism (communism) was just another necessary step in the overall trajectory of a universal historic process that was bound to make its way, in the manner of a physical law, or ‘a matter of historical inevitability’ (Patnaik 2017). Thus, the transition to the ‘future’ of humanity would inevitably take its course. The only thing necessary was to make sure that the progress already made by the ‘socialist camp’ could not be reversed by forceful (military) action on the part of the capitalists who wanted to defend their ‘moribund’ system at all costs. This notion of being on the ‘right side’ of the historical process nevertheless caused another blind spot, which later became an important element in the breakdown of the whole model of state-socialism. By declaring their societies as socialist by mere virtue of their existence (representing ‘actual socialism in practice’ as distinct from socialism as a theoretically abstract and ideal concept), the revolutionaries in the East to a large extent lost any ability to critically analyse their societies and to remedy any aberrations. In general, the East was not over-focused on a permanent extension of its spheres of influence, but it felt compelled to industrialise as rapidly as possible in order to counter the potential (‘hot’) military threat to its own existence. The proactive material support provided to national liberation movements remained a rare exception, and was mostly limited to neighbouring countries or regions.
From the perspective of the Western elites, the East–West Conflict amounted to something of a clash of two empires both wanting to gain world hegemony. From this perception, the differences between the two systems are rooted less in their ‘class structure’ than in the means that they were willing to employ to reach their final aims. In this view, in both systems the ruling elites (oligarchies) were trying to enrich themselves at the expense of the working population. The major difference seemed to persist in the way it was done. In the West, a liberal political superstructure of competing political parties was based on a competitive market economy which produced welfare and opportunities of mass consumption for the successful few, by accepting smaller or larger numbers of poor and deprived people. In the East, the elites granted less political freedom to their citizens and mobilised a maximum of economic resources by using rigid methods of central planning and direct political interference into the economy. The results, in the East, were lower standards of consumption but less social inequality.
Strangely, despite limited political freedoms and lower consumption levels, the ‘socialist empire’ seemed to be attractive enough, particularly for the newly emerging nation-states that surfaced in the international arena after their liberation from the colonial yoke. With US President Dwight Eisenhower announcing his ‘domino theory’ (which posited that if one country in a region came under the influence of communism, then the surrounding countries would follow in a domino effect), in 1954 the race for supremacy in the East–West Conflict also became – from the Western perspective – a race for influence and domination in the decolonising, so-called Third World.
Thus, the global struggle for spheres of influence that particularly gained momentum after the process of decolonisation took off in the early 1950s must be seen as an immediate consequence of the Russian Revolution and the ensuing confrontation of antagonistic blocs after World War II. Indeed, one of the most remarkable developments of that era is the sheer explosion in the number of newly independent – in that sense ‘young’ – nation-states in the second half of the 20th century. Prior to World War I, there were about 30 independent states, but in the period 1920 to 1940, their numbers increased to 65 (see Hobsbawm 1996, 110). By the end of the 1980s, numbers reached almost 170, later growing to about 200. This astonishing development was caused by the successful struggle for independence of former colonies under the realm of the East–West Conflict and – ironically – after the end of the Cold War, when not only the Soviet Union but also Yugoslavia and some other nation-states such as Czechoslovakia disintegrated.
These geo-political changes seemed at first glance to strengthen the position of the Eastern Bloc, where these young nation-states were seen as ‘principal’ allies. But the political leaders of many of these new states were well aware of the dangers of getting involved in a disastrous war if the ‘Cold’ War were escalated into a ‘hot’ war of apocalyptic dimensions. They therefore tried to avoid direct affiliation with one of the ‘camps’. This was one of the major reasons why politicians like Nasser in Egypt, Nehru in India, Sukarno in Indonesia and Tito in Yugoslavia laid the foundations at the Bandung Conference in 1955 for the Non-Aligned Movement; the Movement was founded as an organisation on the Brijuni Islands in Yugoslavia in 1956.
The ‘Non-Aligned’ were by no means an anti-Soviet alliance, but their leaders clearly voiced their demand for the right to choose a self-determined path of development. Thus, the movement started as a kind of fundamental critique of the Soviet Bloc, and the Soviet Union in particular, who claimed to represent the only viable alternative to capitalism. Nevertheless, the East–West Conflict and the opening up of the United Nations as a world community of independent states enabled the ‘Non-Aligned’ to play an important geo-political role – at least for a while. In fact, the appearance of the movement to some extent changed the ‘bipolar World’ of the Cold War into ‘a multipolar world (the West, the Soviet East, China, and the South) that forced imperialism to retreat’ (Amin 2016, 77). However,
the potential of the Bandung movement wore out within some fifteen years, emphasizing … the limits of the anti-imperialist programs of the national bourgeoisie. Thus the conditions were ripe for the imperialist counter-offensive, the re-compradorization of the Southern economies, if not … their recolonization. (Amin 2016, 75)
It was not just for ‘Third World’ countries that the bipolar dispensation in geo-politics opened up spaces to manoeuvre. From the 1970s, the USA and its allies encountered some serious setbacks in connection with military defeat in Vietnam and a wave of nationalisations in the Global South (of which the emergence of the organisation of oil-producing countries, OPEC, was one remarkable symbol). The ensuing fight for zones of influence and the attempts to ‘contain’ the Soviet Bloc led increasingly to so-called proxy wars, in which the allies of the West fought a ‘hot’ war inside the ‘Cold’ War of the superpowers on their behalf. This phenomenon affected Africa and southern Africa in particular – the region where the ‘Cold War’ took the form of a ‘hot war’ (Shubin 2008).
Here again, the notion that both antagonists deliberately acted in the same way and in the same spirit needs to be questioned. Seen from the viewpoint of the West, it was necessary to counter the domino principle, i.e. to avoid a growing number of nation-states/governments adopting ‘socialist concepts’ and actively rejecting neo-colonial economic and political relations, as this was already understood as proto-socialist and therefore a pro-Soviet concept. The mobilisation of ‘pro-Western forces’ who were willing to take up arms and fight bloody civil wars against their own populations seemed also to be an appropriate tool in order to avoid any direct confrontation between the Western and the Eastern Bloc, in the sense that it was seen as a way of containing ‘communism’ without risking a ‘hot’ war between the superpowers.
Seen from the viewpoint of the East, all these movements for self-liberation and against neo-colonial practices were part of a historical process that inevitably led from capitalism to socialism. Thus, there was no particular need to artificially encourage such movements but, once their confrontation with imperialist elements broke loose, the principle of international solidarity compelled the Eastern Bloc to act in solidarity with them. Ironically, as mentioned above, such incidents put further strain on the resources of the socialist states. Nevertheless, feeling the commitment to solidarity with the decolonisation movements, the Soviet Union and its allies actively supported this mass movement in various ways. Beginning in the 1950s, the Eastern Bloc started to provide military training for liberation fighters and sent material assistance to ‘liberated zones’ in many regions of the world.
One of the first occasions was certainly the Soviet support of Egypt against the Suez Aggression provoked by France and Great Britain in 1956. Also later, for example in Congo under the presidency of Patrice Lumumba, the USSR and other socialist countries provided military aid. The anti-apartheid struggle in southern Africa, as well as the anti-colonial struggle in the former Portuguese colonies (Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau), however, created a challenge of new dimensions, since these liberation movements demanded massive engagement from the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc as a whole. Petr Yevsyukov, desk officer of the Africa Section of the International Department of the Soviet Communist Party between 1961 and 1975, commented that the ‘assistance to nationalists [in Southern Africa] from socialist countries, first and foremost the Soviet Union, was a natural reply to their appeal for such help’ (see Shubin 2008, 3).
It remains an open question as to whether all these conflicts (not just those in Africa) can be rightly named ‘proxy wars’, as the West preferred to call them: this term was not used in the Soviet Union and the Eastern camp. But one thing must be borne in mind: all of these wars and civil rebellions had just one major aim – the liberation of the respective peoples from colonial oppression and – in the case of South Africa – from apartheid. It may be that the involvement of the antagonistic blocs further brutalised and extended warfare, and thus led to increased numbers of casualties. But it is useless to think that these wars and conflicts could have been avoided – because they were not just proxy wars, but were wars to achieve self-determination and national sovereignty. These acts of self-liberation were not imposed by some third force, particularly the East: they were the expression of the unstoppable will to achieve freedom from colonial rule. As Amilcar Cabral observed, ‘we will never abolish imperialism by shouting and cussing at it. For us, the worst and best cuss to imperialism … is to take up arms and to fight’ (Cabral 1968, 18).1
The legacy of the Russian Revolution is not limited to a global bipolar dispensation that provided some interstices, spaces which the struggle for national liberation and national sovereignty was able to use and where it could gain advantage by wisely manoeuvring between two major blocs. There are also theoretical deliberations on the political economy of development that attracted the attention of political decision makers soon after the Revolution. These issues will be addressed in Part II of this article: ‘The Russian Revolution and the mantra of developmentalism’.