1 Introduction

Note: We thank colleagues who stimulated and inspired this volume, especially members of the round table discussion on “Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and African Decolonization: New Perspectives” at the BASEES Annual Conference, 8.–10. April 2022, in Cambridge, UK, namely Natalia Telepneva and Ulf Engel, for their insightful comments. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Leibniz ScienceCampus “Eastern Europe – Global Area” (EEGA) which made the publication project possible. Furthermore, we thank the editor of the series, Matthias Middell, and EEGA student assistant Luise Thierack for her watchful eyes when we were editing this volume.

Scholarship emphasizing the complexity of the concept of the Cold War – specifically, research which goes against bipolar assumptions of “West” against “East” – has blossomed in the last decade. It has come to be recognized that the global conflict between the superpowers in the second half of the twentieth century was linked to the process of decolonization and liberation in Africa in complex ways. With more and more archival materials being available and more and more studies being undertaken, it became obvious that a binary Cold War perspective falls short in unfolding the complex geographies of connections and the multipolarity of actions and transactions, some of which continue to influence relationships today. What connections were there between the two superpowers and those in Africa who were seeking liberation, and how did those connections change over time? Which side of the ideological divide between the superpowers in the Cold War was more successful (or lucky) in impacting actors and societies in Africa?

Our previous edited volume, entitled Southern African Liberation Movements and the Global Cold War “East” (2019), was part of this new trend in Cold War scholarship.1 Both that volume and this one consider such questions from the perspective of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union by considering individual actors and their various agendas, entanglements, frictions and contingencies in navigating those encounters.2

Many different actors outside Africa supported the struggles for liberation and processes of decolonization in Africa, and liberation movements deliberately tried to keep open connections to all supporters, be they in the West, East, North, or South. Despite the promising body of work that has been developing in the last ten years, too little is known about the networks that were shaped through the movement of individuals and ideas from Africa to the “East”3 and from the “East” to Africa. Relations between former Soviet bloc countries and those of the Global South were complicated and filled with contradictions, as were the many connections forged during the Cold War. Peripheral actors, like Bulgaria and Hungary, played a role in tightening the screws of globalization across both sides of the Iron Curtain and in directions that defy West-East and North-South axes.

This volume tries to place the East-South axis of interconnections and exchanges at the centre of its analysis. By shedding light on oblique rather than horizontal or vertical flows of people, technology, ideas, knowledge, and investments, we seek to explore what, contrary to some previous scholarship, was very dynamic and complex.4 Inspired by the spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences and the growing field of global and transregional area studies, this volume asks: What aspects of the historiography of the twentieth century needs to be reconsidered, based on the new findings presented here?

Our contributors have conducted research on actors in archives in Anglophone, Lusophone, Francophone, and Russian/Soviet contexts. New sources and materials are here connected to previous dialogues and scholarly exchanges on the manifold ties between Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and African decolonization. With a thematic focus on the diversity of relations between the “Other Europe” and African independent countries and liberation movements from 1960 to 1990, the studies in this volume reassess aspects of the role of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the decolonization of Africa. They acknowledge the role of scientific and technological exchanges, diplomatic encounters, and transfers in this process. This volume both reconsiders previous debates and stays true to the actor-centred approach that shaped our previous volume. Some chapters in this collection feature a prosopographical approach of groups and organizations (chapter 2 by Helder Adegar Fonseca), whereas others focus on individual agency (chapter 10 by Robin E. Möser, for example). The focus on actors and their agency is complemented by a micro-history approach (such as that in chapter 4 by Ana Moledo).

A focus on individuals and organizations and their agency is more timely than ever, considering the wider geopolitical shifts that the Russian invasion in Ukraine in February 2022 provoked. This is picked up in the final chapter, which considers post-1989 legacies of African engagements with societies in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, taking into account the vote in the United Nations General Assembly in spring 2022. The war on Ukraine had an impact on this publication in that it has had repercussions in diplomacy and scientific collaboration – even scholarly production. Colleagues were actively hindered or prohibited from publishing or participating in certain contexts, and some lost the means and infrastructures to teach, research, and write. Two of the original contributors to this volume withdrew their joint contribution from fear of being misunderstood by the academic public. We share the concern of many that such developments may have a destructive effect on balanced history writing and scholarly cooperation.

1 Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and Africa – Some Historiographical Trends

While early African historiography sought to build narratives of “national liberation” to legitimize national struggles, more recent Africanist historiography has tried to complicate this narrative. Scholarship on African liberation movements and socialist internationalism has tried to move away from an emphasis on the state. The same trend has happened in the case of Soviet and Eastern European studies, as scholars have stressed the importance of solidarity networks.

The most popular conception of the Cold War, the conflict that pitted the Soviet Union against the United States after 1945, invites a binary understanding of power in international society. Since both the United States and the Soviet Union were the only “superpowers” during the Cold War, effective power, it seemed, must have resided solely with the two giants. The end of the Cold War led to a substantial rethinking of the definition and geographic context of the conflict. In one trend, scholars have shifted their attention to examining the agency of so-called “junior members in the international system” and their role in intensifying the conflict. The publication of Odd Arne Westad’s The Global Cold War5 inspired a plethora of new research emphasizing the role of local actors in shaping Cold War struggles in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.6

Meanwhile, historians of Eastern Europe have attempted to recover the agency of Eastern European states in the process of decolonization. There has been an explosion of scholarship that tries to reconstitute links, connections, and solidarities between these two worlds from the perspectives of actors in Prague, East Berlin, Belgrade, Budapest, and Bucharest. What comes out of this research is a central premise that state socialist Eastern European countries engaged with the Third World, including African actors, because of their own interests and not as a result of a “diktat” from Moscow and its “expansionist policy based on supporting liberation movements”.7 The ability to profit from these exchanges is seen as an important factor in many recent works, as Eastern European countries tried to sell goods, including arms, especially as their debt problem grew exponentially in the 1980s. For many smaller Eastern European communist states, lacking the vast resources of the Soviet Union, this was also a way to escape economic dependence on Moscow. Many recent works have also examined the role of individual people and their motivations, trying to understand what “socialist internationalism” meant to the doctors, teachers, filmmakers, journalists, diplomats, and spies who engaged with actors in the Third World.8

Spurred partly by the opening of archives and partly by the publication of The Global Cold War, the last decade has seen a proliferation of research on the role of African, Asian, and Latin American actors in the Cold War. The 1950s and 1960s remain the most studied decades, when there was a lot of optimism about the expansion of socialism, as well as a peak of...