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Perspectives on the Soviet Union and the Horn of Africa During the Cold War

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Perspectives on the Soviet Union and the Horn of Africa During the Cold War FORUM PERSPECTIVES ON THE SOVIET UNION AND THE HORN OF AFRICA DURING THE COLD WAR ✣ Commentaries by Robert H. Donaldson, Jeremy Friedman, Edward A. Kolodziej, Margot Light, Robert G. Patman, and Sergey Radchenko Reply by Radoslav A. Yordanov Radoslav A. Yordanov, The Soviet Union and the Horn of Africa during the Cold War: Between Ideology and Pragmatism. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016. 293 pp. $95.00. Editor’s Note: This forum brings together six experts on Soviet policy to- ward 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 Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 22, No. 1, Winter 2020, pp. 210–242, https://doi.org/10.1162/jcws_c_00931 © 2020 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 210 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws_c_00931 by guest on 29 September 2021 Perspectives on The Soviet Union and the Horn of Africa during the Cold War relatively low-risk Soviet challenge that sought ideological victories for “so- cialism” as well as strategic benefits in the economic and military spheres. The initial Soviet forays became a broader-based investment under Leonid Brezh- nev, 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 an- alyzed in earlier studies, two especially valuable contributions: extensive cov- erage 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 ef- forts 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 Rus- sian working class had “nothing to lose but its chains,” and the position of the USSR in the world of the 1970s and 1980s is graphically depicted in the 211 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws_c_00931 by guest on 29 September 2021 Forum often repeated statement Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko made in 1971 that “there is no question of any importance in the world nowadays that can be decided without the Soviet Union or in opposition to it.”1 This statement reflects an attitude of pride and confidence that is quite different from the earlier era of hostility and suspicion. As the USSR’s stake in the international order increased, Soviet leaders’ unwillingness to make a risk-laden challenge to the status quo was reflected in a marked loss of revolutionary fervor. Soviet officials long claimed that their chief internationalist duty was not the export of revolution abroad but the building of Communism at home. Many thorough studies of the topics pursued in Yordanov’s book have been published by Western scholars, especially in the 1970s and 1980s when Cold War competition in the Horn of Africa was at its height. Although Yor- danov includes a large number of these secondary sources (17 pages’ worth!) in his bibliography, he fails to point out clearly and precisely what his exten- sive archival research has added to (or subtracted from) the more contempo- raneous studies. Did the scholarly studies written during the Cold War fail to appreciate the relative unimportance of ideological factors in shaping the Soviet approach? Some specialists surely did, and the U.S. government itself was prone to exaggerate the threat of the spread of Communism in the Third World, but Western scholarly studies of the era were by no means universally alarmist in their assessments of Soviet activities. Most analysts have correctly differentiated among the approaches taken by successive Soviet leaders during the Cold War. Oddly, however, Yordanov takes no notice of Iosif Stalin’s death in 1953 or Khrushchev’s ouster in 1964 and the changes in Moscow’s line that accompanied these leadership shifts. It is hard to understand why Yordanov devotes only twenty pages (about the same space allotted to the spotty Soviet involvement in Africa in the 1940s and 1950s) to the critical period December 1978 to March 1985. This was a time of extensive change in the U.S.-Soviet Cold War competition (and in the attitudes of major Third World powers) that witnessed decisive changes in the Soviet leadership and the ill-fated December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Yordanov evidently attributes more significance to the Islamic revolution in Iran in explaining Washington’s perception of a greater regional threat from Moscow (p. 210), whereas most accounts (including those of U.S. policymakers) underscore the threat said to emanate from the Afghanistan 1. XXIV S”ezd Kommunisticheskoi Partii Sovetskogo Soyuza, 30 marta–9 aprelya 1971 goda: Stenografich- eskii otchet, 4 vols. (Moscow: Politizdat, 1971), Vol. 1, p. 482. 212 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/jcws_c_00931 by guest on 29 September 2021 Perspectives on The Soviet Union and the Horn of Africa during the Cold War invasion as the more important precipitating factor in the final collapse of détente and formulation of the Carter Doctrine.2 U.S. and Soviet policymakers viewed events in the Horn of Africa dur- ing this period in the larger context of their naval competition in the Indian Ocean. Yordanov writes about Soviet designs on the Somali port of Berbera (esp. pp. 85–89) without full consideration to this larger context or of the variety of motives ascribed at the time to the Soviet moves. At the very least, a certain level of Soviet naval activity seemed to be a natural outgrowth of the USSR’s acquisition of superpower status and global military capabilities. But a detailed analysis of port calls in the region by the Soviet Navy in the period from 1968 to 1974 does not support the theory (undergirding the Carter Doctrine and Ronald Reagan’s policies) that Moscow was attempting to gain military dominance in the region (by matching U.S. naval strength or by “filling the vacuum” resulting from British withdrawal) in order to achieve strategic dominance over regional oil resources and shipping routes or to in- tervene in regional crises by means of “gunboat diplomacy.” Nor does the evidence show that the Soviet Union was concentrating its naval presence only on “progressive” regimes in the area. Although the Indian Ocean pro- vided the most direct route for the routine transfer of naval units from the Far East to the Black Sea, Moscow used its expanding naval capability for the purpose of “showing the flag” and supporting its foreign policy objectives, including its foreign trade, in many of the littoral states. In so doing, So- viet leaders were following the examples of the “imperialist” British and U.S. navies and the teachings of their nineteenth-century mentor, Alfred Thayer Mahan.3 Ethiopia and Somalia were only two of eleven countries with which the USSR concluded treaties in the 1970s, and competing doctrinal and strate- gic considerations were present in most of the regions of the Third World in which the Soviet Union was heavily involved.
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