Perspectives on The Soviet Union and the Horn of Africa during the Cold War

Abstract

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 toward 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.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 relatively low-risk Soviet challenge that sought ideological victories for “socialism” as well as strategic benefits in the economic and military spheres. The initial Soviet forays became a broader-based investment under Leonid Brezhnev, 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 analyzed in earlier studies, two especially valuable contributions: extensive coverage 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 efforts 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 Russian 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 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 Yordanov includes a large number of these secondary sources (17 pages’ worth!) in his bibliography, he fails to point out clearly and precisely what his extensive archival research has added to (or subtracted from) the more contemporaneous 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 invasion as the more important precipitating factor in the final collapse of détente and formulation of the Carter Doctrine.2U.S. and Soviet policymakers viewed events in the Horn of Africa during 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 intervene 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 provided 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, Soviet leaders were following the examples of the “imperialist” British and U.S. navies and the teachings of their nineteenth-century mentor, Alfred Thayer Mahan.3Ethiopia and Somalia were only two of eleven countries with which the USSR concluded treaties in the 1970s, and competing doctrinal and strategic considerations were present in most of the regions of the Third World in which the Soviet Union was heavily involved. I have written extensively about these factors in the case of Soviet policy toward India.4 A volume I edited in 1981 drew together the work of twenty specialists to assess how successful (or rather, relatively unsuccessful) the USSR had been in its approaches to the Third World. The evidence adduced in these studies shows that Soviet influence in the Third World remained limited, in part—as Yordanov also shows—by the strong impulses toward autonomy and national self-determination of the Third World countries themselves. Many of Moscow's biggest “victories” in the Third World resulted from events over which it had little or no control. Together the studies in the 1981 volume demonstrate that, rather than overestimating the ideological appeal of the Soviet Union (or the USSR's ability to provide economic support), U.S. policymakers should have given as much or more attention to promoting economic development and political institutionalization, rather than focusing mainly on the military dimensions of security.5In sum, Yordanov's research on Soviet Cold War policies in the Horn of Africa begs to be placed in a comparative context, examining some of the other cases in which “clients” attempted to play their “patrons” off against each other or in which the Soviet Union preferred maintenance of stability to support of revolutionary impulses.Unfortunately, the most worthwhile insights to be gained from archives in Moscow and East European capitals are hard to locate in the book. Readers who are not already closely familiar with the history of Ethiopia and Somalia will find the twists and turns of the conflicts in the Ogaden and Eritrea difficult to sort out, especially because Yordanov's narrative does not proceed chronologically. Most of his chapters are too dense, reading more like a dissertation, so that it becomes hard to find the forest for all the trees. Adding to the difficulty, the volume contains many mistakes of spelling and syntax and even internal contradictions, and the tables and maps are not well sourced or described. A better-written account that placed the Soviet Union's Cold War activities in the Horn of Africa in a comparative context would have made this volume a more valuable contribution to the literature.As the frontier of Cold War scholarship moves into the late 1970s and 1980s, the story of superpower involvement in the Horn of Africa looms large for several reasons. First, Ethiopia under Mengistu Haile Mariam (1977–1987) was the closes thing there has been to an attempt to implement Stalinism in Africa, complete with a Red Terror and a massive famine resulting from disastrous state policies. Second, the Ogaden War of 1977–1978 between Ethiopia and Somalia represented the high point of Soviet-Cuban cooperation in Africa and therefore is a vision of the marriage of superpower capability and proletarian internationalism at its apex. Finally and perhaps most interesting to those engaged in understanding the processes of Soviet foreign policymaking, the case of the Horn of Africa saw the USSR torn between two potential allies and ultimately switching from one to the other in fairly short order. For all these reasons, Radoslav Yordanov's book, as the first monograph on the subject to make use of the currently available materials in the former Eastern bloc, represents a welcome addition to the literature and one that will be useful for scholars of Soviet foreign policy.Drawing on archival materials from all former Warsaw Pact states as well as the former Yugoslavia, the United States, and the United Kingdom, Yordanov tells the story of Soviet involvement in the Horn of Africa from the early post-1945 years to the end of the Cold War. He describes Soviet attempts to contest Western influence at the state level in Ethiopia while simultaneously promoting Communist ideas, particularly among receptive university students, in part through the efforts of other East-bloc diplomats. In Somalia, Yordanov traces Soviet hesitation in the face of aggressive Somali demands for military and economic aid throughout the 1960s before the culmination of relations in the Soviet-Somali friendship treaty of 1974. One of the strongest parts of the book is Yordanov's description of the gradual shifts in Soviet perception of the progress of the Ethiopian revolution from 1974 to 1977, setting the stage for the Soviet support for Ethiopia against its erstwhile ally Somalia, once the latter launched an aggressive war to conquer the Ogaden region in August 1977. Perhaps due to the limitations of available archival materials, the book's analysis of the period of Soviet-Ethiopian alignment, particularly as it relates to the measures taken to transform the Ethiopian economy along socialist lines, is not as detailed. The book concludes with a chapter on Soviet policy toward Ethiopia in the wake of perestroika, where the argument is that the imperative to end the Cold War with the United States overrode any impulse to advance revolution, particularly because the Ethiopian approach to socialist revolution seemed to be harming socialism's reputation around the world.Perhaps the most illuminating part of Yordanov's analysis relates to the high-level decision-making process in Moscow that led to the Soviet Union's support for Ethiopia against Somalia in the Ogaden War despite the USSR's existing military relationship with Somalia centered on the naval base at Berbera. In the absence of access to archival sources, scholars during the Cold War speculated that the shift represented a political tug-of-war within the Soviet policy apparatus, pitting considerations of ideology against those of realpolitik.6 Yordanov weaves a more intricate, well-researched, and convincing story that describes how a combination of factors, including superpower maneuvering, Ethiopian domestic politics, and the imperatives of proletarian internationalism, gradually shifted the consensus in the Soviet Politburo. This part of the book is strongest in part because it takes account of the roles of competing officials within the Soviet leadership, an approach that is not always reflected in the literature. At many points elsewhere in the book the calculus of Soviet foreign policy is reduced to a collision between supposed “Cominternist” and “Narkomindel” approaches, terms that seem both anachronistic and not especially helpful in describing actual debates in Moscow.Yordanov's treatment of the Soviet-Cuban relationship in Ethiopia provides a welcome addition to the growing literature on the role of Cuba in Africa. He contrasts the cooperative nature of this endeavor with the situation in Angola, where Yordanov, echoing the work of Piero Gleijeses, sees the Cubans as having taken the initiative with much less consultation with Moscow. Most intriguing is Yordanov's description of Cuba's unwillingness to employ its military in support of Mengistu's domestic battles, particularly with the Eritrean insurgency, in contrast to the Soviet-bloc states, particularly East Germany, that played a role in building Mengistu's security apparatus following Moscow's lead.The book is particularly strong in its description of the military relationships between the USSR, Ethiopia, and Somalia, but it is not quite as strong on the economic relationships. In this respect, research in the files at the Russian State Archive of the Economy might have shed light on what role the Soviet Union played in Mengistu's ultimately disastrous attempt to build socialism in Ethiopia. This will no doubt prove fruitful ground for future researchers. Yordanov's book will provide a useful starting point as others go forward to fill in a crucial, yet still understudied part of the Cold War.This exhaustive narrative of the efforts of the Soviet Union to promote its ideological and geostrategic interests in the Horn of Africa is almost certain to be the last word on the subject. In excruciating detail Yordanov traces the tortuous and ultimately futile steps taken by successive Soviet regimes to exploit shifting clients in the Horn, notably Ethiopia and Somalia. Displaying a tenacious resourcefulness, Radoslav Yordanov not only consulted Western archives but also, by his own account, extensively reviewed “an avalanche of documents, written in languages spoken from Alexanderplatz through Piata Victoriel to Gorki-2” (p. xviii).The added work paid off. Yordanov ably demonstrates the complicity of Moscow's Warsaw Pact surrogates, specifically Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria, in supporting Soviet endeavors to gain major influence in the Horn. The East European countries largely provided non-military and diplomatic support to advance the Marxist-Leninist cause and furnished Moscow with useful intelligence about its fickle African clients.Numerous other interesting and even surprising findings can be gleaned from Yordanov's recounting of Soviet policy. When the Soviet Union was pursuing its interests, pragmatic opportunism typically trumped ideological aspirations. The latter provided a thin veneer of justification for wasting precious resources—in short supply in the Soviet Union—on what in retrospect were quixotic attempts to gain lasting influence in the Horn.During the Cold War, some analysts depicted Soviet actions in the Horn as aggressive and malign, but Yordanov offers a more cautious assessment. Throughout the long history of Soviet involvement in the region from World War II to the implosion of the USSR in 1991, Soviet behavior in the region emphasized stability. Moscow's caution was demonstrated in its sustained attempts to moderate the enduring conflicts between Ethiopia and Somalia and other minor regional actors. Repeatedly, Soviet officials rebuffed the demands, alternately pressed by local actors in Addis Ababa or Mogadishu, for arms to combat their adversaries. Even when arms were sent, they were invariably less than would have been necessary to tip the scales decisively in favor of one temporary (and rented) client over another.Yordanov helpfully reminds readers of Cuban involvement in the Horn and Angola. The Soviet Union provided significant logistical support for Cuban military intervention in the Horn, principally in supporting the regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam, the Ethiopian faux-Communist reformer who proved more appealing to the Cubans than to the Soviet Union. To prevent Horn conflicts from getting out of hand at the expense of Soviet interests, Moscow had to restrain the Cubans, who were more ideologically motivated and accepting of risks than Soviet leaders were.Until 1991, the Soviet Union gave less priority to involvement in the Horn than to its interests in the Middle East and, especially, to its relations with the United States. Yordanov shows that the Soviet Union tried to ensure that Soviet and Cuban involvement in the Horn would not preclude damage to its management of the global Cold War struggle with the United States.The major conclusion to be drawn from Soviet intervention in the Horn is that Soviet leaders were unable to advance their ideological and geostrategic objectives. More often than not, the locals successfully played both the Soviet Union and the United States for their own competing ends.A point made by a critic of a Mozart symphony prompts my chief reservation about this bulky volume: “Too many notes!” In developing his principal themes, Yordanov might well have taken note of the aphorism that less is often more in keeping a reader's attention from occasionally flagging.No single aspect of policy contributed more to the decline of détente after 1975 than Soviet activity in the Third World, particularly in Africa. Whereas Soviet leaders interpreted détente to apply only to Europe, Western policymakers thought it should extend to global East-West relations. Most Western policy commentators therefore believed that, under cover of détente, the Soviet Union had adopted an unprecedented, active policy and was making incursions into areas traditionally considered at least neutral or even firmly within the Western sphere of influence.Radoslav Yordanov analyses Soviet policy in one of these contentious areas—the Horn of Africa—from 1960 until the end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. It is a complex story. Apart from the East-West competition in the region (and Yordanov demonstrates convincingly how strategically important Ethiopia and Somalia were to the United States and the Soviet Union), the USSR also faced competition from the People's Republic of China (PRC) after the two countries bitterly split at the end of the 1950s. Soviet leaders also found themselves—not quite inadvertently, but without proper consideration of the likely costs—supporting neighboring states involved in seemingly intractable territorial conflicts. To make the situation on the ground even more complicated, the Soviet Union made extensive use of its East European allies to deliver assistance and, according to Yordanov, to analyze the local situation. Moreover, from 1977 onward, Cuban troops were active in the Horn.Yordanov uses Soviet, Western, and East European archives to offer a detailed chronological overview of Soviet intervention in the region, concentrating particularly on the second half of the 1970s. He concludes that Moscow's approach to the region, “locked between pragmatism and ideology, ultimately gave priority to realpolitik considerations, while ideological factors acted as a motivating trigger that helped the Kremlin leaders justify their action” (p. 253). Rather than seeing Ethiopian and Somali leaders as passive recipients of Soviet prescriptions (as they are sometimes portrayed in analyses that pay less attention to the importance of local factors), Yordanov recognizes them as active agents who attempted to use the East-West rivalry to further their aims. He also accords more importance to superpower competitive behavior as a driver of policy. Soviet and Western leaders were receptive, he argues, to “the local strong men's pulling strategies” because it served their political and strategic aims (p. 254).The advantage of using a wide range of archival sources is that Yordanov's assessment is richer and more nuanced than most previous accounts. The cost, however, is that the narrative sometimes loses clarity. His use of East European documents is particularly original. However, interesting though the views of East European diplomats are, Yordanov's account does not make clear the extent to which Soviet decision-makers paid attention to their analyses. His argument that Moscow's East European associates “made Moscow's experience a truly ‘international’ one” (p. xviiii) seems a little overblown.Alternating chapters deal with Soviet policy in Ethiopia and Somalia. The strength of this approach is that it enables Yordanov to demonstrate how complex the situation was on the ground and to reveal how important local factors were. The disadvantage is that the narrative goes backward and forward in time, and it sometimes becomes chronologically confusing. It also makes the account somewhat repetitive, since the years overlap (chapter 4, “Engaging Mogadishu: October 1969–March 1976,” for example, is followed by a chapter covering “Ethiopia in Turmoil: February 1974–December 1976”) and, inevitably, the same external events have to be mentioned in multiple chapters. The immersion in local factors is also at the cost of giving due consideration to the larger context of the evolution of Soviet foreign policy and of East-West relations. The change in Soviet Third World policy from Nikita Khrushchev's optimistic and idealistic (rather than ideological) approach to the more pragmatic policy followed by his successors after his removal from power is not really accorded any significance until the concluding chapter. Nor does Yordanov pay much attention to the effect of the changing context of East-West relations on Soviet foreign policy in general—and policy toward the Third World in particular.Yordanov uses the terms “Narkomindel” and “Comintern” as shorthand for foreign policy dictated by realpolitik and policy based on ideology. Why he finds these anachronistic terms applicable to Soviet policy during decolonization is unclear. His explanation of what the terms mean is sketchy. They refer, he writes, to “Lenin's dualist foreign policy furthering ideological (‘Cominternist’) and statist (‘Narkomindel’) lines” (p. xxv). The book's “List of Abbreviations and Acronyms” indicates that “Narkomindel” is short for “Narodnÿï Kommissariat po Inostrannym Delam” but does not explain that this means the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, which is what the Ministry of Foreignl Affairs was called until 1946. The list also explains that “Comintern” is the “Communist International” but does not describe what the Comintern was or note that it was dissolved in 1943. So the terms are meaningful really only to readers who know the history of the dual foreign policy practiced by the Soviet Union soon after the Bolshevik revolution. Such readers will be aware that the implied dichotomy between the two terms is misleading. After all, the Second Congress of the Comintern in 1920 debated the appropriate forces to support in the European colonies. The proposal by the Indian Communist N. M. Roy that the Comintern ought to create Communist organizations of workers and peasants was defeated by Vladimir Lenin's insistence that bourgeois democratic and peasant movements should be aided because the national bourgeoisie would lead independence movements that would weaken European countries. This was as much a policy based on Soviet national interest as it was an ideological policy. Thus, even in the early years, the pursuit of national interest and the aims of ideology were not entirely mutually exclusive.In the era of decolonization, supporting revolutionary forces was as much in the Soviet national interest as it was ideologically important. Given that by then the Soviet Union was competing with the PRC for influence in the Third World and that the Chinese leadership accused Soviet leaders of being “revisionist,” aiding revolutionary forces in former colonies was squarely in the Soviet national interest. Soviet leaders would have lost face in the international Communist movement if they had refused to support states that declared they had embarked on a “socialist orientated” path of development, and reputation is as much a matter of national interest as it is of proving revolutionary credentials. Even after the end of the Cold War, encouraging other states to adopt similar values has remained an important aim of foreign policy. Democratic peace theory and the efforts made by the United States and the European Union to export democracy to the former Communist countries illustrate how pursuing ideological aims is now considered central to serving the national interest.One reason that Yordanov insists on the distinction between realpolitik and ideology is that he intends to show that different parts of the Soviet decision-making apparatus promoted different policies. He suggests in his introduction that the military leadership, military-minded members of the Politburo and the International Department, as well as the KGB State Security organs, favored a Cominternist policy, whereas the more pragmatic Foreign Ministry maintained a statist line. But the subsequent chapters offer little evidence to support the argument that different Soviet bureaucracies competed for influence over Soviet decision-making in the Horn. Moreover, in the book's conclusion, Yordanov argues that “the two lines did not conflict with one another but, consulted together [sic], added up to a flexible tactical approach aimed at maximizing influence with whatever means were available—ideological, military, diplomatic” (p. 256).Notwithstanding the unnecessary complication of suggesting a dichotomy between Soviet national and ideological interests, Yordanov uses sources ignored by most others to give readers a rich, nuanced account of Soviet intervention in the Horn that is an original and valuable contribution to our understanding of Soviet foreign policy and also of the factors that led to both superpowers exiting the Horn.In some ways, The Soviet Union and the Horn of Africa during the Cold War is a significant piece of scholarship. Drawing on a wide range of research materials that include formerly secret documents from the countries of the former Warsaw Pact, Radoslav Yordanov's book provides new information and insights on the rise and decline of Soviet involvement in the Horn of Africa, a key Cold War battleground for the superpowers and their allies.But the book's analytical rigor does not always match its detailed narrative, and Yordanov struggles to sustain claims of exceptionalism in relation to the previous literature on the subject.The book seeks to address a central question: “What possessed Moscow to pour tons of military material in such remote geographic expanses and to scramble its junior East European partners in the