The Second World S Third World (Kapitel 1)

The Second World's Third World
David C. Engerman
Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, Volume 12, Number

1, Winter 2011 (New Series), pp. 183-211 (Article)
Published by Slavica Publishers
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https://muse.jhu.edu/article/411667
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Articles
The Second World’s Third World

David C. Engerman
For historians of Soviet foreign policy, the Third World in the Cold War has
long been something of an afterthought—or, in the words of one leading
practitioner, “a sideshow to the main drama of the Cold War.”1 Indeed, the
very term “Cold War” reflects a focus on Europe. First used in reference to
the Nazi “phony war” (Sitzkrieg) in 1938, the term described opposing troops
facing each other but not exchanging fire.2 That applied well enough to post-
World War II Europe, where the war remained “cold” in that no direct mili-
tary engagements took place. But the term hardly fit the Third World, where
many if not most countries found themselves embroiled in genuine military
conflict with global implications at some point during the “Cold” War.
When the Third World did come to scholars’ attention, it was usually
during moments of crisis involving superpower showdown. In these conflicts,
Third World leaders seeking help from the USSR were typically considered
Soviet puppets, and Third World countries themselves functioned only as
a backdrop to Soviet–American confrontation. This view of Soviet–Third
World relations in the Cold War could be crudely summed up in an anec-
dote from June 1950. When reporters asked the State Department spokes-
man which individual bore responsibility for the North Korean offensive,
he blamed Iosif Stalin. He posed the rhetorical question, “Can you imagine
Donald Duck going on a rampage without Walt Disney knowing about it?”3
1
The terms first/second/third worlds themselves have a meaningful history that will not be
dwelt upon here. It is also worth noting that Soviet writings typically avoided these terms, pre-
ferring “developing countries” (razvivaiushchiesia strany), “the East” (vostok), or “economically
underdeveloped countries” (ekonomicheski slaborazvitye strany). For a critical review of Western
categories, see Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of
Metageography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). Quotation from Vojtech Mastny,
“The Soviet Union’s Partnership with India,” Journal of Cold War Studies 12, 3 (2010): 88.
2
“Hitler’s Cold War” (editorial), The Nation 146 (26 March 1938): 345–46.
3
Edward W. Barrett, Truth Is Our Weapon (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1953), 156.
Indeed, Stalin not only knew about Kim Il-Sung’s plans but approved them—only after Kim
Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 12, 1 (Winter 2011): 183–211.
184 DAVID C. ENGERMAN
Third World leaders like Kim Il-Sung, in this construction, were Stalin’s pup-
pets or his creations.
This view that Moscow directed all of its allies’ actions in the Cold War is
no longer sustainable. The declassification of archival materials in the 1990s
in Moscow and across the former Soviet bloc rebalanced the “objective cor-
relation of sources” between the superpowers. It revealed opposition to Soviet
policies both within and beyond the Soviet leadership. Yet it did little to
change the geographical or topical focus of the field.4 Even the best scholars
at the leading institutions of the new Cold War history used these newly
excavated sources to answer old questions with broader perspective and more
sophistication. The history of superpower crises has been greatly enriched
by the nuggets harvested from what Mark von Hagen termed the “archival
gold rush.” These materials showed how Third World clients shaped Soviet
foreign-policy decisions through persistence, manipulation, and pleading. Yet
scholarship on the Cold War has remained focused on wars and crises in
Korea, Cuba, and Vietnam, and primarily on military aid or relationships
between communist parties. Now that the gold rush is over, it is time to mine
further afield, searching for new documents and new approaches to the study
of the USSR in the world.5 In doing so, scholars can build on recent over-
views of Soviet foreign policy that devote more attention to Soviet engage-
ments in the Third World.6
Work on East–South relations can become part of a broader effort to
study the USSR in transnational context—a trend familiar to readers of this
and other journals on Soviet history.7 This essay will make the case for studying
made multiple entreaties. See Kathryn Weathersby, “Soviet Aims in Korea and the Origins of
the Korean War, 1945–1950,” Cold War International History Project Working Paper, no. 8
(1993).
4
The quotation is from the masthead of Cold War International History Project Bulletin 5
(Spring 1995): 160.
5
Mark von Hagen, “The Archival Gold Rush and Historical Agendas in the Post-Soviet Era,”
Slavic Review 52, 1 (1993): 96–100.
6
See, for instance, Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy J. Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War: The
Inside Story of an American Adversary (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006); and Vladislav M.
Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
7
See two recent special issues on transnational Soviet history: Larissa Zakharova and
Eleonory Gilburd, eds., “Repenser le Dégel: Versions du socialisme, influences internationales
et société soviétique,” Cahiers du monde russe 47, 1 (2006); and “Imagining the West in Eastern
Europe and the Soviet Union,” Kritika 9, 4 (2008). On East–South relations in particular, see
Narue-Pierre Rey, ed., “L’URSS et les Suds,” Outre-Mers, no. 354–55 (2007).
THE SECOND WORLD’S THIRD WORLD 185
Soviet–Third World contacts in particular.8 By taking better account of the

connections with the Third World—whether political, cultural, economic,
or diplomatic—historians of the Soviet Union could contribute to multiple
scholarly agendas, many of which already relate to their own concerns. More
serious attention to East–South relations will help recast the Cold War as a
fundamentally multipolar conflict, with the superpowers constantly respond-
ing not just to each other but to their allies and adversaries in the Third
World. Scholars not centrally concerned with international relations could
also benefit from a consideration of the full range of East–South connections;
whether interested in the Academy of Sciences or in higher education, study-
ing the physical and intellectual traces of the Third World in the USSR offers
excellent insights into ostensibly “domestic” Soviet history. Such a focus on
the periphery could, paradoxically, bring the study of Soviet foreign relations
closer to the central concerns of the field as a whole.
In pursuing the history of the Second World’s Third World, scholars
could learn from the major reconceptualization and expansion of the study
of U.S. diplomatic history since 1980, when Charles Maier accused it of
“marking time.”9 Studies of U.S.–Third World contacts—including but not
limited to formal diplomatic relations—have blossomed in recent decades,
as many new topics have come to the fore: a web of economic, cultural, and
intellectual connections between the United States and the outside world,
only some of which involved the State Department. Many scholars refer to a
“cultural turn” or a “new diplomatic history,” but those falsely suggest a single
direction or emphasis rather than a field moving in different and even con-
tradictory directions simultaneously.10 Scholars of U.S. foreign relations are
examining the flows of people and ideas internationally, treating the experi-
ences of tourists, migrants, soldiers, and diplomats as aspects of international
8
For a similar call, with useful citations, see Tobias Rupprecht, “Die Sowjetunion und die
Welt im Kalten Krieg: Neue Forschungsperspektiven auf eine vermeintlich hermetisch abge-
schottete Gesellschaft,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 58, 3 (2010): 381–99.
9
Charles Maier, “Marking Time: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations,” in
The Past before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States, ed. Michael Kammen
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980); see also Michael H. Hunt, “The Long Crisis in
U.S. Diplomatic History: Coming to Closure,” Diplomatic History 16, 1 (1992): 115–40.
10
For helpful guides to the literature in the 1980s and 1990s, see the relevant articles repub-
lished in Michael J. Hogan, ed., America and the World: The Historiography of U.S. Foreign
Relations since 1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). For more recent scholar-
ship, see Peter L. Hahn and Mary Ann Heiss, eds., Empire and Revolution: The United States
and the Third World since 1945 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2001); and Kathryn
C. Statler and Andrew L. Johns, eds., The Eisenhower Administration, The Third World, and the
Globalization of the Cold War (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006). Four diplomatic
historians debate the state of the field in Journal of American History 95, 4 (2009): 1053–91.
social history.11 Scholars have tracked the process of “Americanization” as well

as the growth of anti-Americanism—another way in which scholarship has
come a long way since it studied only (in one critic’s words) “the world ac-
cording to Washington.”12
Scholarship on U.S.–Third World relations has explored a variety of
themes relevant for understanding Soviet relations with the Third World.
Writings on race have been especially numerous and original, with a general
but not exclusive focus on African-Americans’ ties to Africa. They have ex-
plored in admirable depth not just the formation of American foreign pol-
icy in Africa but the ways in which American political and cultural history
has been shaped by the engagement with Africa and the Third World.13 An
increasing number of works investigate the ways in which concepts of race
shaped U.S. foreign relations.14 Similarly, new work on international students
and cultural exchanges explore not just America’s impact on the world but the
world’s impact on the United States.15
11
For instance, Petra Goedde, GI’s and Germans: Culture, Gender, and Foreign Relations,
1945–1949 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); Christopher Endy, Cold War Holidays:
American Tourism in France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); and
Jonathan Zimmerman, Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
12
See, for instance, Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through
Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); on anti-Amer-
icanism, see especially Max Paul Friedman, “Anti-Americanism and U.S. Foreign Relations,”
Diplomatic History 32, 4 (September 2008): 497–514; and Sally Marks, “The World According
to Washington,” Diplomatic History 11, 3 (July 1987): 265–282.
13
On the domestic politics of Africa policy, see Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black
Americans and U.S. Foreign Policy, 1935–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1996). On cultural and intellectual interactions, see Penny M. von Eschen, Satchmo
Blows up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2006); Mary L. Dudziak, Exporting American Dreams: Thurgood Marshall’s African
Journey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). And for an influential view of how American
civil rights history was shaped by international politics, see Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil
Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2000). On the intellectual impact of travels to Africa, see James Campbell, Middle Passages:
African-American Journeys to Africa, 1787–2005 (New York: Penguin, 2006).
14
See, for instance, Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race
Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Paul A.
Kramer, Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); and Jason C. Parker, Brother’s Keeper: The
United States, Race, and Empire in the Caribbean, 1937–1962 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2008).
15
Paul Kramer, “Is the World Our Campus? International Students and U.S. Global Power in
the Long Twentieth-Century America,” Diplomatic History 33, 5 (2009): 775–806; Engerman,
Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts (Oxford: Oxford University
Scholarship on American modernization and development programs has

both expanded and transformed in the last decade. Pioneering accounts on
the topic were written by anthropologists who were deeply critical of U.S.
aid.16 A first wave of historical work analyzed the projects using documents
from official U.S. archives to show how ideas about modernization shaped
American policy discussions.17 New work has expanded the chronological
and intellectual reach of modernization ideas and practices, showing how
many different meanings modernization held within donor as well as recipi-
ent nations.18 Other scholars have crossed borders between intellectual and
diplomatic history, or between domestic and international history, showing
the pervasiveness and persuasiveness of ideas about modernization and de-
velopment in the 1950s and 1960s.19 Scholars with deep area studies train-
ing have also expanded the geographic context by looking at the complex
interactions between donors and recipients. The simple vision of Americans
dictating the direction of Third World countries, even among its allies, is
harder to sustain after reading, for instance, the account of Indonesian efforts
to reframe modernization as a military project in Brad Simpson’s aptly titled
Press, 2009), esp. chaps. 6–7; Liping Bu, Making the World Like Us: Education, Cultural
Expansion, and the American Century (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003).
16
For ethnographies, see James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development,”
Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1994); and more recently Tania Murray Li, The Will to Improve: Governmentality,
Development, and the Practice of Politics (Durham. NC: Duke University Press, 2007). For
discursive analysis, see Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking
of the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); and Wolfgang Sachs,
ed., The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power (London: Zed Books, 1992).
17
Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation
Building” in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Dennis
Merrill, Bread and the Ballot: The United States and India’s Economic Development, 1947–1963
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Nick Cullather, “Development?
It’s History,” Diplomatic History 24, 4 (2000): 541–654. For a snapshot of the field as of
2003, see David C. Engerman, Nils Hilman, Mark Haefele, and Michael E. Latham, eds.,
Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 2003).
18
Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); David Ekbladh, The Great American
Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order, 1914 to Present
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).
19
Nick Cullather, “The Foreign Policy of the Calorie,” American Historical Review 112, 2
(2007): 337–64. For citations to similar work, see David C. Engerman, “American Knowledge
and Global Power,” Diplomatic History 31, 4 (2007): 599–622; and Alyosha Goldstein, “On the
Internal Border: Colonial Difference, the Cold War, and Locations of ‘Underdevelopment,’ ”
Comparative Studies in Society and History 50, 1 (2008): 26–56.
Economists with Guns.20 Nor is U.S. development the only show in town.
Historians of Western Europe have begun serious research into overseas ac-
tivities in the postcolonial world.21 Finally, historians have been exploring
the ways in which an alphabet soup of international organizations—ranging
from the World Bank to agencies under the UN umbrella—shaped evolving
theories and practices of development.22 Work on Western modernization
and development projects has quickly incorporated intellectual and cultural
history while exploring the on-the-ground workings of these projects, full of
tensions and conflicts with the countries receiving aid.
For all of its growth and sophistication, though, this scholarship still has
a major gap. Americanists constantly invoke the Cold War context, showing
how education, development, and university research were weapons in the
“battle for the hearts and minds” of the Third World. Yet few pay much at-
tention to the opponent in this battle, the USSR, and none examines in any
depth Soviet activities in the Third World. Specialists in Soviet history have
done little here to help. Readers of the scholarly journals and monographs
would find only dim inklings of the variety, intensity, and meanings of Soviet
engagements with the Third World. This essay highlights some of these works
and suggests avenues for further research.
Writing the history of the Second World’s Third World, fortunately, can
take advantage of contemporaneous Western scholarship on Soviet–Third
World activities during the Cold War. The handful of political scientists
who devoted themselves to charting these activities produced remarkably
thorough accounts based on scarce and problematic sources. Roger Kanet,
perhaps the most prolific Anglophone scholar on East–South relations, iden-
tified two major trends in Soviet attitudes toward the Third World: first, a
gradual turn away from ideology and toward “realism,” especially after the
heady optimism of the Khrushchev years. Second, Kanet focused attention
20
Bradley R. Simpson, Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.–Indonesian
Relations, 1960–1968 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008); Gregg Brazinsky,
Nation Building in South Korea: Koreans, Americans, and the Making of a Democracy (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
21
See, for instance, two special journal issues: Contemporary European History 12, 4 (2003);
and “Modernizing Missions: Approaches to ‘Developing’ the Non-Western World after 1945,”
Journal of Modern European History 8, 1 (2010).
22
Amy L. M. Staples, The Birth of Development: How the World Bank, Food and Agriculture
Organization, and World Health Organization Changed the World, 1945–1965 (Kent, OH: Kent
State University Press, 2006); Daniel Maul, Menschenrechte, Sozialpolitik und Dekolonisation:
Die Internationale Arbeitsorganization (IAO), 1940–1970 (Essen: Klartext, 2007); Richard
Jolly et al., U.N. Contributions to Development Thinking and Practice (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2004); Michele Alacevich, The Political Economy of the World Bank: The Early
Years (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).
on the intensification of Soviet Third World contacts: first came military aid,
then came troops from Soviet proxies, and finally direct Soviet intervention.23
He and others provided both impressive detail and a broad heuristic for un-
derstanding Soviet policy, always looking from Moscow outward.24 These
contemporaneous works bore marks of time and context. First and foremost,
these works explicitly and unabashedly treated the Soviet Union as an an-
tagonist. Superpower competition shaped the point of view, the tone, and
the assumptions of scholarship appearing before 1991. Even works by such
original scholars as Zbigniew Brzezinski and Alexander Dallin brim with lan-
guage about the Soviet “penetration” of the Third World and about the ways
in which the USSR foisted aid on unwise or unwitting Third World leaders.25
Scholars in the 1950s and 1960s wrote of a Soviet “economic offensive” in
the Third World, with the sense of alarm that that nomenclature implied.26
Worries about economic aid were soon enough displaced by concerns
about military aid. By the late 1960s, Western scholars focused almost ex-
clusively on military dimensions when they discussed Soviet aid. They typi-
cally saw such aid as part of Soviet grand strategy—or, more dramatically, the
Soviet scheme for world domination. Francis Fukuyama, before he became
a neoconservative oracle (and then apostate), epitomized this perspective.
Writing with Andrzej Korbonski, Fukuyama asserted, “Moscow has reason-
ably consistent objectives and the means used to achieve them … often bear
the marks of systematic planning.” Strikingly, they presented this conclusion
as a revision of prior scholarship emphasizing Soviet grand strategy without
qualifiers. They, like other scholars, dealt only with military aid to the exclu-
sion of economic relations. Fukuyama and Korbonski, for instance, dated the
“opening volley” of Soviet outreach to the Third World to 1955, when Egypt
23
See, for instance, Roger Kanet, ed., The Soviet Union and the Developing Nations (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974).
24
See Kanet’s useful retrospectives: “The Superpower Quest for Empire: The Cold War and
Soviet Support for ‘Wars of National Liberation,’ ” Cold War History 6, 3 (2006): 331–52;
“Sowjetische Militärhilfe für nationale Befreiungsbriege,” in Heiße Kriege im Kalten Krieg,
ed. Bernd Greiner, Christian Th. Müller, and Dierck Walter (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition,
2006); and “Vier Jahrzehnte sowjetische Wirtschaftshilfe,” in Ökonomie im Kalten Krieg, ed.
Greiner, Müller, and Claudia Weber (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2010).
25
Zbigniew Brzezinski, “The African Challenge,” and Alexander Dallin, “The Soviet Union
in Africa: The Political Dimension,” both in Africa and the Communist World, ed. Brzezinski
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1963), v, 4, 47.
26
Zbigniew Brzezinski, “The Politics of Underdevelopment,” World Politics 9, 1 (1956): 55–
75; Joseph S. Berliner, Soviet Economic Aid: The New Aid and Trade Policy in Underdeveloped
Countries (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1958), 33; Marshall I. Goldman, Soviet
Foreign Aid (New York: Praeger, 1967).
received its first shipment of Soviet and Czech armaments.27 Numerous eco-
nomic agreements that the Soviet Union signed between 1953 and 1955—in-
cluding some with Egypt—were neglected.28
Cold War-era scholarship on Soviet–Third World relations, furthermore,
usually contained elements of a policy brief; almost every work concluded with
a discussion of U.S. policy options. Making do with a very limited range of
published sources, scholars typically incorporated not just policy statements
but academic debates into their analyses of Soviet policy. Their works asserted
(or, worse, assumed) that any Soviet publication, including academic journals,
represented the official party line.29 These assertions in turn bolstered notions
of a Soviet grand strategy in the Third World. Scholars typically traced the ac-
tions of any communist country back to Moscow; other communist countries
(including, through the 1950s, China) were simply proxies carrying out Soviet
orders—much like Kim Il-Sung’s Donald Duck and Stalin’s Walt Disney.
 
A focus on the Third World’s Cold War—and on the Soviet Union’s actions in
the region—changes not just the geography but the chronology and even the
topography of the conflict. Broader examination of the Third World in the
Cold War demonstrates, for instance, the ideological nature of the conflict;
a shifting competition helps explain why the superpowers were competing
for influence in areas marginal to their national interests. No Third World
country was powerful enough to present a serious military or economic
threat to the superpowers, and only a few had significant economic resources.
Superpower competition in the Third World was driven in part by the need
to demonstrate the superiority of each ideology by gathering allies and imi-
tators.30 Yet ideology could divide as well as unite within the three worlds of
the Cold War.
27
Andrzej Korbonski and Francis Fukuyama, “Preface,” to The Soviet Union and the Third
World: The Last Three Decades, ed. Korbonski and Fukuyama (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1987), xii, vii. See also, for example, Alvin Z. Rubinstein, Moscow’s Third World Strategy
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).
28
On early Soviet–Egyptian agreements, see Charles B. McLane, Soviet–Middle East Relations
(London: Central Asian Research Centre, 1973), 35.
29
A few works sought to study these connections, even without access to adequate sources.
See, for instance, Robert Remnek, Soviet Scholars and Soviet Foreign Policy: A Case Study in
Soviet Policy towards India (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1975); and Oded Eran,
Mezhdunarodniki: An Assessment of Professional Expertise in the Making of Soviet Foreign Policy
(Ramat Gan, Israel: Turtledove Publishing, 1979).
30
Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our
Own Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), chaps. 1–2; Engerman, “Ideology
The most important divide in the so-called Second World was, of course,
between the USSR and the People’s Republic of China. As Lorenz Lüthi’s
award-winning new book on Sino-Soviet relations—the first to use such a range
of archival materials—demonstrates, the core of the Sino-Soviet conflict was
ideological difference, not antagonistic interests or competition for prestige.
Lüthi’s facility with Russian and Chinese gave him access to excellent archival
materials to allow the retelling of this story, but it was his native German that
provided some of the best material; the East German SED Party Archive was
a tremendous resource for Lüthi. With these sources, plus a smattering from
Romanian and Bulgarian archives, Lüthi shows convincingly that the diver-
gence of China and the Soviet Union began in the mid-1950s, as each side
contemplated its respective domestic policies; Khrushchev accelerated changes
in the Soviet Union while Mao Zedong reversed a failed effort at liberaliza-
tion. As Lüthi shows, the “seminal issue” behind the Sino-Soviet conflict was
ideological: “the basic idea behind the first Chinese Five-Year Plan.” That plan
echoed the first Soviet plan, with its basis in mobilization and coercion, at a
time when Khrushchev was increasing his distance from Stalinist policies. Lüthi
convincingly argues that Mao “controlled the relationship’s deterioration and
eventual collapse.” Starting in 1957, he used the Soviet Union as a foil to reach
new domestic goals and enforce his ideological supremacy by marginalizing his
domestic opponents.31 Chinese initiative in Sino-Soviet relations transformed
East–West competition in the Third World. By the early 1960s, such competi-
tion had become tripolar, with Soviet efforts to influence Third World leaders
under attack from both China and the United States. One sign of this new
three-way competition was Khrushchev’s speech in early 1961—addressing
the Higher Party School but aimed at his Chinese comrades—declaring Soviet
commitment to come to the aid of national liberation struggles around the
world.32 Coming only weeks before John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, the speech
reinforced the young president’s determination to challenge aggressively what
he considered Soviet encroachments around the Third World.33
and the Origins of the Cold War, 1917–1962,” in Cambridge History of the Cold War, ed.
Melvyn P. Leffler and Westad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
31
Lorenz Lüthi, The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2008), 11–12, 41, 112, 109.
32
N. S. Khrushchev, “Za novye pobedy mirovogo kommunisticheskogo dvizheniia,”
Kommunist, no. 1 (1961): 25–29. More generally, see Jeremy Friedman, “Soviet Policy in the
Developing World and the Chinese Challenge in the 1960s,” Cold War History 10, 2 (2010):
247–72.
33
See, for instance, Thomas J. Noer, “New Frontiers and Old Priorities in Africa,” in Kennedy’s
Quest for Victory: American Foreign Policy, 1961–1963, ed. Thomas G. Paterson (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1989).
Chinese enthusiasm for confrontation with the capitalist world shaped

a variety of conflicts in Asia, including Korea and Vietnam. The Chinese at-
titudes complicated Soviet actions in the region, pushing Khrushchev toward
brinksmanship in cases where he had originally sought compromise. By the
early 1960s, Soviet leadership was as busy trying to rein in its Chinese ally as
it was trying to control the Pathet Lao, the Viet Cong, or local communist
parties across Asia.34 The Sino-Soviet split weighed especially heavily on the
increasingly troublesome situation in Indochina, which has been a topic of
much recent scholarship.35
The Chinese threat to Soviet influence was greatest in Asia, where China’s
stakes were highest and Mao’s reputation strongest. Debates within the
Communist Party of Indonesia in the early 1960s, for instance, soon favored
Chinese comrades over Soviet ones. The issue here was primarily ideological,
as Indonesian party leaders felt that the Soviets were unable to formulate
an effective concept for communist parties outside Europe. The Indonesian
tilt toward the Chinese was especially damaging for the Soviets, who had
made Indonesia the exemplar of Soviet aid and support in Asia.36 The Chinese
threat also extended into Africa. Zanzibari radical political leaders, for ex-
ample, expressed great enthusiasm for rapid industrialization through central
planning and enthusiastically studied both the Soviet and Chinese experi-
ences. Like his counterparts around the Third World, Zanzibar’s Ali Sultan
Issi sought to learn from both communist powers and felt “free to put all
ideologies to the test, to see which was most viable and most suitable for our
conditions.” They even excused the devastating famines in both countries
as unfortunate but worthwhile side-effects of rapid industrialization. By the
mid-1960s, Zanzibari leaders, now part of the Tanzanian government, leaned
distinctly toward China, citing Chinese similarities to predominantly agricul-
tural Tanzanian society and the success of Chinese aid programs.37
34
Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War, 394, 424; E. O. Obichkina, “Sovetskoe ruko-
vodstvo i voina v Alzhire 1954–1962 gg. po materialam arkhiva MID RF,” Novaia i noveishaia
istoriia, no. 1 (2000): 19–30.
35
Ilya V. Gaiduk, The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996);
Gaiduk, Confronting Vietnam; Qiang Zhai, China and the Vietnam Wars, 1950–1975 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Mari Olsen, Soviet–Vietnamese Relations and
the Role of China, 1949–64 (London: Routledge, 2006).
36
Ragna Boden, Die Grenzen der Weltmacht: Sowjetische Indonesienpolitik von Stalin bis Brežnev
(Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2006), esp. chapter 2.7. Boden refers to Soviet “Konzeptlosigkeit”
(“conceptlessness”) in dealing with non-European communist parties (321).
37
Ali Sultan Issi, in Race, Revolution, and the Struggle for Human Rights in Zanzibar, ed.
G. Thomas Burgess (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009), 61; Thomas Burgess, “A Socialist
Diaspora: Ali Sultan Issa, the Soviet Union, and the Zanzibari Revolution,” in Africa in Russia,
The Soviet Union, though leader of the world communist movement,

faced plenty of competition from other allies, not just China. Take, for in-
stance, Cuba. In the aftermath of the Missile Crisis, Soviet leaders put an
increased emphasis on promoting revolution in Latin America, an aim shared
with their Cuban comrades.38 But Cuban leaders did not limit their sights
to the region; they were also active in Africa, an effort that culminated in
more than 4,000 Cuban troops fighting alongside the Popular Movement for
the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) in the 1970s. These soldiers were typically
seen as proxies fulfilling a Soviet mission, a view roundly challenged in an
impressive and original book by Piero Gleijeses that retells the story from a
Cuban perspective—what he calls Cold War history “from below.” Cuban aid
to Angola started in 1967, well before the conflict attracted international at-
tention in the mid-1970s. This aid, in turn, emerged from a Cuban relation-
ship with African revolutionaries that went back to the first years of Castro’s
rule. Cuban and Algerian radicals experienced what one Cuban intellectual
called “spontaneous brotherhood.”
By 1965, when Che Guevara toured African hotspots, the Cuban gov-
ernment was more focused on fomenting revolution in Africa than in Latin
America. Foreshadowing support for MPLA, a Cuban column fought in
Zaire in 1965—with the Soviets and Chinese informed only after the fact.
This contingent in Zaire, Gleijeses notes, meant that more Cubans fought in
Africa than in Latin America between 1959 and 1980. Castro and Guevera
undertook this support in spite of the diplomatic and economic fallout, both
potential and actual: Cuban support for the Algerian leader Ahmed Ben Bella,
for instance, jeopardized relations with President Charles de Gaulle of France
as well as an agreement to export sugar to Morocco (which was, it should be
noted, a client for Soviet military aid). Ditto for Angola a decade later; in an
international oral history project, Castro insisted: “That was a decision of
ours. The only thing that came from the Soviet Union was worries.”39
Why did Cuban revolutionaries devote their limited resources to a con-
tinent so remote? Taking power immediately before “The Year of Africa”
Russia in Africa: Three Centuries of Encounters, ed. Maxim Matusevich (Trenton, NJ: Africa
World Press, 2007), 270–71, 281–82.
38
Daniela Spenser, “The Caribbean Crisis: Catalyst for Soviet Projection in Latin America,” in
In from the Cold: Latin America’s New Encounter with the Cold War, ed. Gilbert M. Joseph and
Daniela Spenser (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).
39
Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 9, 184, 31, 29, 92–93, 377, 306–7. Gleijeses
quotes Castro (11 January 1992) from The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962: A National Security
Archive Documents Reader, ed. Laurence Change and Peter Kornbluh (New York: New Press,
1998), 334.
(1960)—in which 17 new countries came into being on the continent—

Castro’s fellow radicals situated themselves as the vanguard of global revolu-
tion. Cubans felt a sense of nostalgia for their own revolution as they watched
similar upheavals take place in Africa. (Soviet nostalgia, tellingly, focused less
on revolution than on industrialization.)40 Cuban leaders did not need or
want Soviet direction in pursuing revolution in Africa; indeed, they faced
constant pressure from the Soviets to curtail their activities there. By the time
of the Angolan intervention in 1975, though, the Soviets were following the
lead of their erstwhile clients, providing transportation support for Cuban
troops.41 From the first days of the Cold War, Soviet leaders followed their
Asian and African clients, very often dragging their feet in doing so; one
scholar writing of Soviet–Vietnamese relations uses the apt term “unequal
interdependence.”42 Donald Duck could draw Walt Disney into war.
Post-1991 scholarship, with unprecedented if uneven access to archival
materials, has emphasized the ways in which superpower competition created
leverage for the Third World nations they were wooing. In case after case,
Soviet leadership was responding to demands, however divergent from Soviet
ideas and interests, from Third World leaders. In 1968, one Vietnamese
journalist told a Soviet counterpart that the Soviets were paying 75–80 per-
cent of the total assistance to North Vietnam in exchange for 4–5 percent
of the influence; the Soviet quibbled with the numbers in his report to the
Central Committee but basically agreed.43 Soviet aid did not even protect
local Communists. In the early 1960s, Anastas Mikoian traveled to Baghdad
to protest to Ba’athist leaders who jailed and eventually executed Iraqi
Communists. ‘Abd al-Karim Qasim, the Iraqi premier, told him to mind his
own business.44 At his summit with President John F. Kennedy in the spring
of 1961, Khrushchev complained that some of the USSR’s most important
clients in the Third World ignored Soviet wishes and repressed their domestic
communist parties even while receiving substantial Soviet aid.45 Superpower
40
Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions, 40–41; K. Krishna Moorty, The Road Begins at Bhilai
(Madras: Technology Books, 1987), 195–202.
41
Westad, Global Cold War, chap. 6; Piero Gleijeses, “Moscow’s Proxy? Cuba and Africa
1975–1988,” Journal of Cold War Studies 8, 2 (2006): 3–51. For a Soviet perspective, see
Vladimir Shubin, The Hot “Cold” War: The USSR in Southern Africa (London: Pluto, 2008).
42
Céline Marangé, “Alliance ou interdépendance inégale? Les relations politiques de l’Union
soviétique avec le Vietnam de 1975 à 1991,” Outre-Mers, no. 354–55 (2007): 147–71.
43
Gaiduk, Soviet Union and the Vietnam War, 72.
44
Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War, 511–12.
45
Transcript of Khrushchev–Kennedy conversation, 3 June 1961, in Prezidium TsK KPSS, ed.
A. A. Fursenko, 3 vols. (Moscow: Rosspen, 2003), 3:189.
competition offered plenty of opportunities for Third World leaders to dic-

tate the terms of relations with the USSR.
Indonesia was one of many sites of Soviet defeat in the battle for “hearts
and minds,” as the USSR lost out first to China and then to the United States.
Ragna Boden demonstrates in her valuable book, Die Grenzen der Weltmacht
(The Boundaries of World Power), that Soviet investments there yielded little
fruit and even less influence. Soviet–Indonesian relations got off to a good start,
as leaders of the newly independent nation established contacts with the USSR
within weeks of attaining independence in 1949.46 Both sides soon sought mu-
tually advantageous trade relations, in spite of the fact that President Sukarno
was attacking the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI).47 By winning Sukarno’s
favor, Soviet diplomats hoped to influence the broader movements that Sukarno
helped lead, by hosting first the Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung in 1955,
and then the Non-Aligned Movement. Hence their responsiveness to Sukarno’s
requests, even as his preferences diverged substantially from Soviet strategic or
economic interests. In spite of sending Indonesia over one-fifth of its total aid
budget for “nonsocialist developing countries,” Soviet authorities found them-
selves with little if any leverage in their dealings with the Sukarno regime. While
the Soviets aimed to make Indonesia a model economy for Southeast Asia,
Sukarno had other agendas. Sukarno wanted a 100,000-seat sports complex in
Jakarta; Khrushchev considered the stadium a waste of money but approved
the project anyway. Even more than grandstanding, though, Sukarno sought
territory—what Boden nicely terms “the territorial development of Indonesia.”
He launched military campaigns in West Irian/West New Guinea and then
the “Crush Malaysia” campaign immediately afterwards. No wonder, then,
that almost 90 percent of Soviet aid to Indonesia was military, even though
it took place under an agreement for “economic and technical cooperation.”
The question of initiative—Third World vs. superpower—also forces a reconsid-
eration of Soviet policy. Contrary to contemporaneous Western fulminations
about a Soviet grand strategy to take over the Third World, Soviet leaders were
responding to Indonesian pressures. The Soviet leadership, Boden aptly con-
cludes, had “no well-thought out plan for their economic aid to Indonesia,”
let alone a global strategy.48 In other situations, Soviet military aid to help al-
46
Larisa M. Efimova, “Stalin and the Revival of the Communist Party of Indonesia,” Cold
War History 5, 1 (2005): 107–20.
47
Oscar Sánchez Sibony, “Red Globalization: The Political Economy of Soviet Foreign
Relations in the ’50s and ’60s” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2009), chap. 5.
48
Boden, Grenzen der Weltmacht, 271–72, 195, 189. Her conclusions are summarized in
Ragna Boden, “Cold War Economics: Soviet Aid to Indonesia,” Journal of Cold War Studies
10, 3 (2008): 110–28.
lies serve their regional interests went beyond equipment and training. Soviet
pilots began a long-term “airbridge” between Egypt and Yemen—in the midst
of the Caribbean Crisis of 1962, no less—not for any direct geopolitical gain
but to strengthen their Egyptian ally. Recent historical scholarship based on an
extraordinary range of archival materials in multiple languages suggests that
Soviet military aid was a multifaceted process with complex motivations and
diverse impacts.49
Similar signs of Third World initiative are evident in Africa. What
Indonesia was for Soviet dreams in Asia, Guinea was for Soviet dreams in
West Africa, as S. V. Mazov argues compellingly in his recent book. Guinea’s
leader, Ahmed Sékou Touré, had close ties to French Communists and was
familiar with the basic works of Marx and Lenin. Alone in Francophone
Africa, Guinea did not adopt Charles de Gaulle’s French constitution. As
punishment, French officials abruptly cut off all aid to Guinea, to the point
of ripping up telephone and electrical lines. Politburo member Frol Kozlov
promised Soviet aid to Guinea as a demonstration of solidarity with newly in-
dependent African nations. Yet a classic litany of errors—sending canned crab
and Bulgarian cognac but no tractor repairmen—soon tarnished the Soviet
image in Conakry. By 1962, Sékou Touré had expelled the Soviet ambassador,
accusing him of antigovernmental activities, and started courting American
aid. U.S. officials soon won over Guinean loyalties, a high-profile fiasco for
Soviet efforts in Africa and a portent of things to come.50 As in Indonesia,
it was the geopolitical competition that provided an opportunity for Third
World leaders to go aid-shopping, playing the superpowers (plus China) off
against each other. One British scholar had it only half-right when he com-
mented that “the Soviet Union proposes, Africa disposes.” What is striking
about much Soviet aid in the Third World is that the Soviet Union neither
proposed nor disposed but was often at the mercy of others.51
China and the Third World aid recipients did not provide the only lim-
its on Soviet power. East European efforts in the Third World further dem-
onstrate the problems of understanding the Cold War strictly in terms of
49
On the Yemen airbridge, see Jesse Ferris, “Soviet Support for Egypt’s Intervention in Yemen,
1962–1963,” Journal of Cold War Studies 10, 4 (2008): 5–36.
50
S. V. Mazov, Politika SSSR v zapadnoi Afrike, 1956–1964: Neizvestnye stranitsy istorii
kholodnoi voiny (Moscow: Nauka, 2008), 60, 79, 152, 162–63—published in English as Sergey
Mazov, A Distant Front in the Cold War: The USSR in West Africa and the Congo, 1956–1964
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010).
51
Christopher Stevens, The Soviet Union and Black Africa (New York: Holmes and Meier,
1976), 191.
Moscow, Beijing, and Washington.52 In India, for instance, Soviet tractor

exporters faced competition from Czech manufacturers, who (according to
the historian Andreas Hilger) “completely command[ed]” the Indian trac-
tor market.53 But intrasocialist commercial competition was only one, and
perhaps not even the most significant, form of multipolarity. Many of the
socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe had extensive relations with
Third World countries, ranging from economic and military aid to educa-
tional programs. Most important was the German Democratic Republic. The
Hallstein Doctrine (1955–69), under which West German governments re-
fused to recognize any nation (aside from the USSR) that recognized their
eastern counterpart, gave East Germany an incentive to build diplomatic
as well as unofficial relations around the world. Shut out of Europe, East
German officials quickly expanded their ties in Asia and Africa, seeking to
stay one step ahead of the West. East and West Germany carried out aid pro-
grams in many of the same countries—for instance, Syria, Iraq, and Nigeria.
The Hallstein Doctrine provided another arrow in the quiver for Third World
countries, well aware of the pressures on East Germany.54 East German efforts
in the Third World were hardly independent of its efforts to build legitimacy
through external recognition—which in turn demonstrate the linkages be-
tween European politics and those in the Third World.
Studies of East Germany have benefited handily if indirectly from
German reunification, which put a wealth of GDR archival materials un-
der Bundesarchiv control. Using these materials, scholars have examined an
impressive range of topics from the heyday of development optimism in the
1950s to the reverberations of late 1960s social movements.55 Even as North–
South connections expanded and broadened, though, Third World leaders
52
Martin Rudner, “East European Aid to Asian Developing Countries: The Legacy of the
Communist Era,” Modern Asian Studies 30, 1 (1996): 1–28; Jude Howell, “The End of an Era:
The Rise and Fall of G.D.R. Aid,” Journal of Modern African Studies 32, 2 (1994): 305–28.
53
Andreas Hilger, “Revolutionsideologie, Systemkonkurrenz, oder Entwicklungspolitik:
Sowjetische–indische Wirtschaftsbeziehungen in Chruschtschows Kaltem Krieg,” Archiv für
Sozialgeschichte 48 (2008): 406.
54
William Glenn Gray, Germany’s Cold War: The Global Campaign to Isolate East Germany,
1949–1969 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Sara Lorenzini, Due
Germanie in Africa: La cooperzione allo sviluppo e la competizione per i mercati di materie prime
e technologia (Florence: Edizioni Polistampi, 2003), chap. 4; Massimiliano Trentin, “ ‘Tough
Negotiations’: The Two Germanies in Syria and Iraq (1963–1974),” Cold War History 8, 3
(2008): 353–80.
55
Christian Jetzlsperger, “Die Emanzipation der Entwicklungspolitik von der Hallstein-
Doktrin: Die Krise der deutschen Nahostpolitik von 1965, die Entwicklungspolitik, und der
Ost–West-Konflikt,” Historisches Jahrbuch 121 (2001): 320–66; Sara Lorenzini, “Globalizing
Ostpolitik,” Cold War History 9, 2 (2009): 223–42; Andreas Hilger, “Moskau und die
successfully maintained control over the aid coming into their countries.
Until the end of the Cold War, Third World leaders were usually able (as one
historian put it) “[to] set the terms and scope of interaction with a super-
power” thanks to the geopolitical competition.56 A similar point, made by a
Russian scholar seemingly nostalgic for the Cold War, credited this competi-
tion for containing superpower misbehavior. With the demise of the USSR,
he wrote, there was no competitor to “uplift” American policies in the Third
World, to save the Third World from American aggression.57
For as much as a focus on the Cold War in the Third World documents
the impact of the superpowers’ competition, it also reveals some of the com-
mon ground between them. Such commonalities, recent scholarship indi-
cates, are visible in spheres of both ideology and practice. Westad’s Global
Cold War, for instance, devotes two extended chapters at the start to outlining
American and Soviet ideologies, beginning well before the origins of the Cold
War itself. Framing the global conflict as ideological in nature, Westad hardly
equates the two superpowers or their policies. But he does suggest how much
the two ideologies shared. They were both set against an older system of in-
ternational relations in which state sovereignty and national interest reigned
supreme. They saw the spread of their respective political and economic sys-
tems around the world as a sign of success. And they were both deterministic,
maintaining confidence in inevitable victory. As terrestrial incarnations of
universalistic and deterministic ideologies, each superpower envisioned that
“the whole world was going our way,” as the title of one recent work had it.
Yet both sides worked fervently to nudge history along, each seeking to ex-
pand its own influence and contain the spread of its opponent.58
But the common ground between the blocs went well beyond ideological
motivation. Working on cases widely dispersed over time and space, various
scholars have noted similarities in the structure and purposes of aid. Both
sides worked primarily if not exclusively through government agencies, and
envisioned (as Oscar Sánchez Sibony put it) “an active state sector” for de-
velopment.59 In spite of American celebrations of free markets, aid officials
Entwicklungsländer,” in Prager Frühling: Das internationale Krisenjahre 1968, ed. Manfred

Wilke (Cologne: Böhlau, 2008).
56
Maxim Matusevich, No Easy Row for the Russian Hoe: Ideology and Pragmatism in Nigerian–
Soviet Relations 1960–1991 (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2003), 262.
57
Vladimir Shubin, “Beyond the Fairy Tales: The Reality of Soviet Involvement in the
Liberation of Southern Africa,” in Africa in Russia, 349.
58
Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and
the Battle for the Third World (New York: Basic, 2005); Westad, Global Cold War, chaps. 1–2.
59
Sánchez Sibony, “Red Globalization,” chap. 5.
always worked through government agencies, including central planning

organizations, and had few compunctions about supporting a significant
government role in setting prices, serving as a purchasing or sales agent, or
operating as the primary player in a key sector.60 From Indonesia to Iraq, fra-
ternal socialist aid bore much in common with aid from capitalist countries:
an emphasis on industrialization and large showcase projects, a determination
to integrate the Third World into global trade networks, and the application
of technical expertise. There was, of course, a qualitative difference in Western
and Soviet versions of planning and state intervention—the difference be-
tween a command and a market economy—though many observers played
down these differences to argue a broader convergence toward some kind of
planning.61 The specifics here address some of the same concerns animating
those writing in the so-called “modernity school” in Russian history, which
emphasizes, with a Foucauldian tilt, the ways in which the practices of Soviet
rule were part of a broader modern political and economic organization that
shared much with other states.62
 
In How Russia Shaped the Modern World, the historian Steven Marks argues
that it was dictatorship, and not central planning or communism, that de-
fined the Soviet legacy in the Third World. He considers Middle-Eastern dic-
tators like Saddam Hussein and Hafez al-Asad as “Oriental despots” who
were “the closest heirs of Stalinism.” Marks has a stronger point when he
identifies “techniques of governance” as a key form of Soviet influence—
more important, he argues, than revolutionary idealism or hopes for eco-
nomic equality.63 Soviet and Eastern bloc aid programs in the Third World
quickly became exercises in state building, for reasons both overdetermined
60
See, for instance, Nick Cullather, “ ‘Fuel for the Good Dragon’: The United States and
Industrial Policy in Taiwan, 1950–1965,” Diplomatic History 20, 1 (1996): 1–26; Bevan
Sackley, “A Perfect (Free-Market) World? Economics, the Eisenhower Administration, and
the Soviet Economic Offensive in Latin America,” Diplomatic History 32, 5 (2008): 841–68.
61
Boden, “Cold War Economics,” 123; Trentin, “Tough Negotiations,” 362; Max F. Millikan,
“Introduction,” to National Economic Planning, ed. Millikan (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1967); Gunnar Myrdal, Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations, 3 vols.
(New York: Pantheon, 1968), part IV, “A Third World of Planning.”
62
Michael David-Fox, “Multiple Modernities vs. Neo-Traditionalism: On Recent Debates in
Russian and Soviet History,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 55, 4 (2006): 535–55; David
L. Hoffmann and Yanni Kotsonis, eds., Russian Modernity: Politics, Knowledge, Practices (New
York: St. Martin’s, 2000).
63
Steven G. Marks, How Russia Shaped the Modern World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2003), 325, 320.
and obscure. Perhaps the most nuanced account of how fraternal socialist
aid worked in the Third World comes from the Italian scholar Massimiliano
Trentin, who has brought together German and Arab sources to analyze the
two Germanies’ aid programs in the Middle East. Trentin observes that the
major concern of the Ba’ath Party (whose program emphasized secular mod-
ernization across the Middle East) was political in two dimensions: it sought
to strengthen central governmental control over the economy and society and
to build Ba’ath party hegemony within this growing state apparatus. These
dual aims, Trentin concludes, gave socialist nations a competitive advantage.
Aiding industry over agriculture and challenging local merchants—as the East
German model did—promoted pro-Ba’athist elements and marginalized tra-
ditional bases of anti-Ba’ath sentiment. Local politics could shape geopolitics
as much as vice versa.64 With an ideological investment in expanding the
state sector, socialist countries helped build state capacities in any number of
ways. They trained economists in India, for instance, where planner-in-chief
Prasanta Mahalanobis actively sought the advice of economists from Gosplan
and the Academy of Sciences as well as the distinguished Polish economist/
planner Oskar Lange.65 East Germany provided a range of technical support
for North Vietnam—including not just weapons but surveillance equipment
to bolster North Vietnam’s internal control apparatus.66
Soviet influence could shape Third World political systems by inspiration
as well as by intervention. Marks is too quick to dismiss two other elements
of Third World attraction to the USSR: ideological and programmatic. Aside
from Third World elites enthusiastic about a socialist future, there were many
who hoped to replicate Soviet economic achievements by applying Soviet
economic instruments. Viewing Soviet industrialization as a successful (if
costly) venture, Third World elites sought to replicate the means of Soviet
success: emphasis on heavy industry, reliance on central planning, extraction
of resources from the agricultural sector, all at a rapid pace. Leaders all over
the Third World, from Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana to Ahmed Sékou Touré
in Guinea to Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt to Jawaharlal Nehru in India,
all celebrated the Soviet model and sought to implement some version of it.
Whereas scholarship dealing with the postcolonial histories of these countries
64
Trentin, “Tough Negotiations”; Trentin, “Modernization as State-Building: The Two
Germanies in Syria, 1962–1972,” Diplomatic History 33, 3 (2009): 487–505.
65
Hilger, “Revolutionsideologie,” 399–400. Mahalanobis also sought advice from Western
economists, including experts on Soviet planning like Abram Bergson.
66
Bernd Schäfer, “Socialist Modernization of Vietnam: The East German Approach, 1976–
1989” (unpublished paper from German Historical Institute workshop on “Modernization as
a Global Project,” March 2008).
recognized the importance of the Soviet model, few specialists on Soviet his-
tory and economics have addressed the issue.67
Newly independent nations proclaimed their appreciation of Soviet plan-
ning, which they saw as distinct from a budding alliance with the USSR. Self-
proclaimed socialist leaders in Algeria and Kenya eagerly sought out Soviet aid
and advice, but this was hardly tantamount to accepting an invitation to join
the Soviet bloc.68 India’s Jawaharlal Nehru sought out Soviet economic aid—
including building an Indian version of Magnitogorsk in Bhilai—while at-
tacking the Communist Party of India at home and leading the Non-Aligned
Movement abroad.69 One interesting, if indirect, perspective on African views
of the USSR comes by way of an unusual primary source: a 1962 survey of
African students in Parisian universities. Centrally planned economies were
much preferred: about 25 percent saw the USSR as their “favorite country,”
slightly ahead of China (20 percent) and well in front of France (8 percent)
and the United States (3 percent). Students’ enthusiasm for the USSR was
primarily practical: its rapid economic progress (35 percent) and its scien-
tific developments (19 percent); ideology (22 percent) mattered but was not
primary. Enthusiasm for China similarly emphasized methods of rapid de-
velopment (44 percent) over ideological factors. Democracy, at least when
thinking of the United States, was a relatively low priority; those favoring the
United States emphasized industrial prowess (37 percent), standard of living
(26 percent), and even jazz (15 percent) over democracy (9 percent). When
asked what economic model they desired, well over 35 percent wanted “in-
tegral socialism” along Soviet lines, whereas only 7 percent wanted a “liberal
economy.”70 Soviet diplomats and aid officials, however, were remarkably ill
equipped to take advantage of this interest. West African economists wanting
to read English-language material about the Soviet economy found nothing
67
See, for instance, Francine R. Frankel, India’s Political Economy, 1947–1977: The Gradual
Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978). See also two essays in Frederick
Cooper and Randall Packard, eds., International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on
the History and Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997): Sugata
Bose, “Instruments and Idioms of Colonial and National Development: India’s Historical
Experience in Comparative Perspective” (45–63); and Frederick Cooper, “Modernizing
Bureaucrats, Backward Africans, and the Development Concept” (64–92).
68
See, for instance, Jeffrey James Byrne, “Our Own Special Kind of Socialism: Algeria and
the Contest of Modernizations in the 1960s,” Diplomatic History 33, 3 (2009): 427–48; and
Daniel Speich, “The Kenyan Style of ‘African Socialism’: Developmental Knowledge Claims
and the Explanatory Limits of the Cold War,” Diplomatic History 33, 3 (2009): 449–66.
69
See the citations in David C. Engerman, “The Romance of Economic Development and
New Histories of the Cold War,” Diplomatic History 28, 1 (2004): 32–35.
70
J. P. N’Diaye, Enquête sur les étudiants noirs en France (Paris: Réalités africaines, 1962),
243–52, 228–30.
produced in the USSR aside from the occasional statistical compendium.

They relied on Western sources to learn about Soviet economic planning,
which no doubt contributed to the diminishing enthusiasm for the USSR
in the 1960s.71 The disconnect between ideologically driven Soviet policy in
the Third World and Third World nations’ focus on practical economic and
political benefits helps explain Soviet difficulties in the region.
For all of the initial excitement about Soviet-style planning, then, the
USSR soon found its principal allies more interested in security concerns
than economic ones. In The Global Cold War, Westad documents with stir-
ring if exhausting effectiveness the extent of Soviet military aid across sub-
Saharan Africa in the 1970s. Superpower intervention—most often meaning
military aid in the form of weapons, advisors, and eventually troops—had
devastating consequences in these regions and well beyond. The aid turned
divisive local battles into highly destructive fronts in a global war, sweeping
governments, economies, and societies across the Third World into its vortex.
Of course, the escalation of such conflicts can hardly be blamed on the USSR
alone, but its involvement, along with that of the United States, left scars
from which parts of the Third World have yet to recover. Dreams of indepen-
dence and economic prosperity (whether socialist or market-oriented) created
nightmares of poverty, famine, and civil war in Ethiopia, Somalia, southern
Africa, and Afghanistan.
 
Studies of East–South relations would make a contribution to histories of

Soviet foreign relations, to be sure, but could also reshape scholarly under-
standing of key domestic Soviet institutions and trends. Elizabeth Bishop’s
impressive dissertation on Soviet engineers and workers involved in the con-
struction of Egypt’s Aswan High Dam offers important insights into what
she calls Soviet “production culture” as well as gender relations. Her insights
indicate the numerous difficulties in taking Soviet work plans at face value,
without the possibility of engaging in the back-channel trading and occa-
sional “storming” that were so ubiquitous in Soviet industrial enterprises.72
Similarly, recent explorations of engagement with the Third World in Eastern
71
Mazov, Politika SSSR, 278.
72
Elizabeth Bishop, “Talking Shop: Egyptian Engineers and Soviet Specialists at the Aswan
High Dam” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1997); Bishop, “Assuan, 1959: Sowjetische
Entwicklungspolitik—die Perspektive der ‘Gender-History,’ ” in Die Sowjetunion und die
Dritte Welt: UdSSR, Staatssozialismus und Antikolonialismus im Kalten Krieg 1945–1991, ed.
Andreas Hilger (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2009).
bloc politics and culture suggest the possibilities of exploring the Third World
in the broader Soviet imagination.73
More readily accessible would be sources on postwar Soviet intellectual
life, which was shaped by the newfound official interest in the Third World.
In the late 1950s, the Soviet Academy of Sciences went on a crash course
for knowledge about the world; it established a welter of area institutes that
paralleled in some ways the American effort to build “area studies” a few
years earlier.74 As in the United States, the expansion of area knowledge in
the USSR was a response to world events undertaken at the instigation of
political leaders. Anastas Mikoian complained in 1956 that the academy was
out of touch with its own time. “While the entire East has awakened in our
time,” he berated the Oriental Institute, “this institute has been napping to
this day. Isn’t it time that the institute raised itself to the level of the de-
mands of our time?”75 Soon thereafter the Oriental Institute added an African
department, which by 1959 had become a separate African Institute at the
academy. A Latin American Institute soon followed. Mikoian’s original tar-
get, the Oriental Institute, soon hived into two programs, one in Leningrad
continuing the long tradition of classical Orientalism while a new Moscow
branch focused on the contemporary “East.”76 With each of these institutes
came new journals—for instance, Narody Azii i Afriki, Latinskaia Amerika,
and Problemy mira i sotsializma.
The history of the African Institute is perhaps most readily visible in
recent scholarship. In his memoirs A. B. Davidson, one of the field’s doyens,
recounts the “Africa Boom” of the late 1950s and early 1960s, in which he
and many others joined a new and exciting intellectual enterprise.77 With
a strong interest in the history of his field, Davidson has incorporated key
73
See, for instance, Robert Gildea, James Mark, and Nick Pas, “European Radicals and the
‘Third World’: Imagined Solidarities and Radical Networks, 1958–1973,” Cultural and Social
History (forthcoming, 2011); and Sudha Rajagopalan, Indian Films in Soviet Cinemas: The
Culture of Movie-Going after Stalin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008).
74
For citations on the American effort, see Engerman, “American Knowledge,” 607–10.
75
“XX s˝ezd Kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soiuza i zadachi izucheniia sovremennogo
vostoka,” Sovetskoe vostokovedenie, no. 1 (1956): 6.
76
A. B. Davidson and Sergei Mazov, “Vvedenie,” in Rossiia i Afrika: Dokumenty i materialy
XVIII v.–1960 g., 2 vols., ed. Davidson and Mazov (Moscow: Institute of World History, 1999),
2:5–6; Tobias Rupprecht, “Progress—Desarrollo—Modernization: Konzepte von Fortschritt
und Modernität in der geteilten sowjetisch–lateinamerikanischen Geschichte 1956–1966”
(Magister thesis, Universität Tübingen, 2007), 53–59. N. A. Kuznetsova and L. M. Kulagina,
Iz istorii sovetskogo vostokovedeniia, 1917–1967 gg. (Moscow: Nauka, 1970), 152–59. By 1960,
the name changed again, to Institut narodov Azii. A useful overview is Eran, Mezhdunarodniki.
77
A. B. Davidson, Moskovskaia Afrika (Moscow: Izdatel´stvo teatral´nogo instituta im. Borisa
Shchukina, 2003), 26–30.
material on the topic into document collections on Soviet–African relations.78

While these collections demonstrate the excitement of the late 1950s, they
also trace the roots of Soviet African studies before the Cold War, as a num-
ber of Soviet scholars learned about the continent through involvement in
the Comintern.79 The comparisons to knowledge about and policies toward
“backward” peoples within the USSR are striking and relevant to the bur-
geoning literature on Soviet nationalities.80 Yet the intensification of Soviet
efforts to understand modern Africa, Asia, and Latin America awaited the
surge of interest in the 1950s. Retelling the history of these institutes would
contribute to scholarly understanding of both policy formation as well as the
relationship between area knowledge and the disciplines—a debate that roiled
American political science in the 1960s and 1970s.81
Cold-War era scholarship read the debates in the academy institutes, in-
cluding not just the regional ones but also the Institute for the World Economy
and International Relations (IMEMO), as proxies for policy debates. As
Mikoian’s 1956 intervention suggests, there clearly was a dense network of
political and intellectual ties between the institutes and the foreign-policy ap-
paratus. At the same time, though, the debates within the regional institutes
did not simply replicate policy disputes. One product of the African Institute,
the sociologist Georgii Derluguian, argues that his institute and its Third
World counterparts were “relatively undogmatized intellectual zones” in the
Soviet Academy of Sciences, existing “on the fringes of official ideology.”82
As scholars like Jerry Hough and Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier observed in the
1970s and 1980s, the pressing debates in these institutes got to the core of
Soviet ideology and eschatology: the evolution of societies. The succession
of concepts discussed in those years suggests both intellectual evolution and
the waning of optimism over the future of the Third World.83 Recognizing
78
Davidson and Mazov, eds., Rossiia i Afrika.
79
Apollon Davidson et al., SSSR i Afrika, 1918–1960: Dokumentirovannaia istoriia vzaimoot-
noshenii (Moscow: Institute of World History, 2003), 56–64.
80
See esp. Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); and Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic
Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005).
81
David-Fox, “Multiple Modernities,” 552.
82
G. Derluguian, “Dogmas and Heresies: Soviet Debate on the Social Nature of the Third
World and the Legacy of Vladimir Krylov,” Année africaine, 1992–93, 448. Davidson, one of
Derluguian’s teachers, in contrast emphasized the “ideologization of African studies” in the
1960s—Davidson and Mazov, “Vvedenie,” 6.
83
This is not strictly an Eastern bloc phenomenon; American scholars, too, wrote with increas-
ing pessimism about the Third World over the course of the 1960s. See Gilman, Mandarins of
the Future, chap. 6; and Ekbladh, Great American Mission, chap. 7.
that not all newly independent nations were ready for the leap to commu-
nism, scholars discussed countries that had an “orientation to socialism,”
meaning that the political allegiances were pro-Soviet even if the material
circumstances were far from socialist. An alternative concept, “noncapitalist
development,” encouraged the adoption of Soviet techniques (central plan-
ning, government ownership, etc.) without proclaiming an explicitly socialist
agenda. But the reigning concept of the mid-1960s, mnogoukladnost´ (multi-
structurality), took hold in part because it came into vogue in precisely that
time for understanding 19th-century Russian history. Derived from Lenin’s
brief description of capitalist remnants in Russia in 1918, mnogoukladnost´
allowed the broadest possible discussion of social, political, economic, and
cultural circumstances that fit poorly within Marx’s unilinear and materialist
framework of history. Not surprisingly, it eventually attracted critics attacking
the lack of partiinost´ in social-scientific scholarship.84 These topics are ripe
for revisiting; Hough’s innovative analysis of published Soviet writings on the
Third World provides an excellent basis for archival work on the topic.
Some recent scholarship has explored the contradictory role of ideology
in another important aspect of Soviet–Third World relations: international
students in the USSR. Ideological subjects were especially prominent at
the Moscow-based universities attracting Third World students: Lumumba
University for the Friendship of Peoples; Moscow State University; the
Institute of the Social Sciences (an organ of the Party’s Central Committee),
which served foreign Communists; and the Komsomol Institute, which in-
cluded Third World cadres in its ranks. The trade union organization also
tried to establish a school for union leaders from the Third World but soon
provoked the hostility of government leaders who resented alternative ac-
cess to power and to Soviet authority. Students came to the USSR from all
over the Third World, with the largest contingents from Soviet allies, but
smaller groups even from staunch Western allies like Kuwait. These elite insti-
tutions in Moscow accounted for only a small share of Third World students
in Soviet universities. Lumumba University had great symbolic importance
but never accounted for more than one-eighth of Arab students in the USSR.
The remainder were at provincial universities or (even more) at techni-
cal institutes.85 A very limited survey of African students who had come to
84
Jerry F. Hough has an excellent if brief synopsis of the rise of the mnogoukladnost´ argument
in his The Struggle for the Third World: Soviet Debates and American Options (Washington, DC:
Brookings Institution, 1986), 54–60. See also Valkenier, Soviet Union and the Third World,
chap. 3.
85
Constantin Katsakioris, “Soviet Lessons for Arab Modernization: Soviet Educational Aid
towards Arab Countries after 1956,” Journal of Modern European History 8, 1 (2010): 85–106.
American universities after leaving Soviet ones included more students from
the Chemical and Oil Institute in Baku than anywhere else. Other data sug-
gested the wide dispersal of Third World students across the USSR.86
As the historians Maxim Matusevich and Vladimir Bartenev demonstrate
in their recent works, Third World students typically wanted practical, not
political, enlightenment. One Nigerian student insisted that he wanted to
study in the USSR in order to learn advanced techniques and technologies,
not to “be ideologized,” as he told one reporter.87 A compatriot studying at
Lumumba University attracted international attention when he complained
in the British press about the ideologization of Soviet education. Arab stu-
dents responded similarly, seeking a diverse range of educational opportuni-
ties but only rarely coming to the USSR on political pilgrimages. Indeed, in
Nigeria, Matusevich reports, Soviet medical and engineering degrees were
not considered acceptable credentials because the degrees involved too much
Marx and not enough medicine or mechanics.88 Similar circumstances ap-
peared in other corners of the Soviet bloc, as Third World students and train-
ees were disillusioned by their educational and living experiences there.89
Some Third World students faced not just disillusionment but dan-
ger. There were dozens of conflicts between African and Soviet students in
Soviet universities in the 1950s and 1960s. The most common spark for vio-
lence was a relationship (real or imagined) between a male student from the
Third World and a Soviet woman. The dangers plaguing African students
in Moscow, furthermore, were hardly absent elsewhere. Ultimately, bringing
Third World students to experience the best of socialist education did not al-
ways result in the “Friendship of Nations”—indeed, sometimes quite the op-
posite. The racial incidents in Moscow and elsewhere prompted the formation
of an African student organization rallying for better treatment.90 Conditions
86
Kenneth L. Baer, “African Students in the East and West, 1959–1966: An Analysis
of Experiences and Attitudes,” Syracuse University Program of Eastern African Studies,
Occasional Paper 54 (July 1970), 7; Nicholas De Witt, Education and Professional Employment
in the USSR (Washington, DC: National Science Foundation, 1961).
87
Matusevich, No Easy Row, 145. More broadly, see Vladimir Bartenev, “L’URSS et l’Afrique
noir sous Khrouchtchev: La mise à jour des mythes de la coopération,” Outre-Mers, no. 354–
55 (2007): 71–76; Konstantin Katsakioris, “Afrikanskie studenty v SSSR: Ucheba politika vo
vremia dekolonizatsii—shestidesiatye gody,” Sotsial´naia istoriia: Ezhegodnik (2008).
88
Mazov, Politika SSSR, 272; Katsakioris, “Soviet Lessons,” 98–99; Matusevich, No Easy Row, 157.
89
See, for instance, Young-Sun Hong, “ ‘The Benefits of Health Must Spread among All’:
International Solidarity, Health, and Race in the East German Encounter with the Third
World,” in Socialist Modern: East German Everyday Culture and Politics, ed. Katherine Pence
and Paul Betts (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008).
90
Julie Hessler, “Death of an African Student in Moscow: Race, Politics, and the Cold War,”
Cahiers du monde russe 47, 1–2 (2006): 33–64. For a retrospective on the university, including
outside Moscow, furthermore, made Lumumba University seem tolerant and

even luxurious. The 55 Guinean students at the Defense Ministry’s aviation
training facility in Kyrgyzstan, for instance, reported that as many as seven
shared a single poorly equipped and ill-furnished room, heated only by a
stove and lacking hot water or sewage disposal. In Zanzibar/Tanzania, enthu-
siasm for Soviet education dulled considerably after the USSR started charg-
ing for the coffins used to repatriate a couple of students who died while in
the USSR—and then billed the families for shipping. Soviet officials ended
their sponsorship of education programs with Algeria because participants
came back with hostile attitudes towards the USSR.91 Only months after the
“Year of Africa” ended, troubles in Soviet universities began to multiply.
Indeed, much of the Soviet encounter with the Third World involved
similar disillusionment. Many Soviet efforts to aid Third World countries
foundered on the inefficiencies of the planned economy, on unrealistic aspi-
rations for aid projects, and the spread of deleterious information about the
USSR into the Third World—most often by people who had been there. A
delegation of Indian engineers and business people, for instance, concluded
its 1954 visit to the USSR by noting the shortages of consumer goods, poorly
constructed buildings, and decrepit and outdated factories.92 Familiarity bred
dissatisfaction, if not contempt.
Nor were Soviet losses only in prestige, as Ragna Boden’s case study
on Indonesia as well as a recent dissertation by Oscar Sánchez Sibony in-
dicate. In material terms, Soviet activities in the Third World were a major
drain on resources. While Soviet leadership emphasized strategic, ideologi-
cal, and economic aims in expanding East–South relations, economics of-
ten was shunted aside. As two historians recently concluded regarding aid
to Afghanistan, Soviet officials were “often economically naïve” about the
actual costs and effects of the aid they administered.93 Karen Brutents, a
Third World specialist in the CPSU’s International Department, recalled
critically:
its difficult post-Soviet life, see Tobias Rupprecht, “Gestrandetes Flaggschiff: Die Moskauer
Universität der Völkerfreundschaft,” Osteuropa 60, 1 (2010): 95–114.
91
Constantine Katsakioris, “Transferts Est–Sud: Échange éducatifs et formation de cadres
africains en Union soviétique pendant les années soixante,” Outre-Mers, no. 354–55 (2007):
95–106; Mazov, Politika SSSR, 269–272, 268; Burgess, “Socialist Diaspora,” 281; Katsakioris,
“Soviet Lessons,” 102.
92
Sánchez Sibony, “Red Globalization,” chap. 5.
93
Boden, “Cold War Economics,” 121; Paul Robinson and Jay Dixon, “Soviet Development
Theory and Economic and Technical Assistance to Afghanistan, 1954–1991,” The Historian
72, 3 (2010): 599–623.
On the whole, the foreign economic policy of the Soviet Union in its
relations with developing countries sinned with many serious miscalcu-
lations. I might take the liberty of saying that our course in the Third
World was in no way planned out, not even simply on a sketchy eco-
nomic basis. There was no real concern about the real links between
political and economic interests, or about whether our presence in this
or that country would be accompanied by … economic opportunities.94
Brutents echoed a confidential 1964 report that accused Khrushchev of

expanding relationships with Third World countries based on insufficient
knowledge or cost–benefit analysis.95 Even with the encroaching pragmatism
in Soviet dealings with the Third World—one of Khrushchev’s last acts, but
one that did not forestall his removal—the USSR still devoted substantial
sums to Third World states. Competing for Third World favor against far
larger capitalist economies put the Soviet Union and its East European sat-
ellites at a grave disadvantage, often overcoming any advantages rooted in
ideology or program. In India, for instance, Western countries, primarily the
United States but also West Germany, were delivering a total aid package
roughly ten times that of the socialist countries. Similar ratios held across
the Third World, the result of Western economic superiority. And yet even as
its contributions fell further behind those from the West, the USSR devoted
enough resources to expanding its Third World influence to contribute to
domestic economic stagnation.96 A series of RAND Corporation reports cal-
culated the increasing “costs of Soviet empire” in the 1980s, predicting that
the cost of competing with the West would soon grow prohibitive.97
As Ragna Boden generalizes from her work on Soviet–Indonesian rela-
tions, “More often than not, the periphery gained while the centers lost.”
Yet even as Soviet costs mounted, gains in the Third World countries were
hard to identify. The fragmentary scholarship on Soviet–Third World rela-
tions suggests that the problems of Soviet aid had many causes. One major
94
K. N. Brutents, Tridtsat´ let na Staroi Ploshchadi (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia,
1998), 301.
95
“Doklad Prezidiuma TsK KPSS na oktiabr´skom plenume TsK KPSS [14 October 1964]
(variant),” Istochnik, no. 2 (1998): 114–17.
96
Fursenko and Naftali, Khrushchev’s Cold War, 543, 77; Sánchez Sibony, “Red Globalization,”
chap. 5.
97
Not all these costs, as RAND calculated them, were related to the Third World; the bulk
of expenditures were in Eastern Europe. See Charles Wolf et al., “The Costs and Benefits of
the Soviet Empire, 1981–1983” (RAND Report R-3419, 1986); and David F. Epstein, “The
Economic Cost of Soviet Security and Empire,” in The Impoverished Superpower: Perestroika
and the Soviet Military Burden, ed. Henry S. Rowen and Charles Wolf, Jr. (San Francisco:
Institute for Contemporary Studies, 1990).
factor will be familiar to all students of Soviet society: the manifest failures
of central planning—the inability to account for local conditions, unrealistic
time horizons, supply problems, and the like. Tales of such problems abound
in the scattered scholarship on East–South relations. Boden counts only 3
of 27 Soviet aid projects in Indonesia completed on time. Soviet projects in
Afghanistan fared better but were hardly a matter of pride: just over half of
the 270 aid projects begun over a 30-year period were completed.98 Perhaps
the most poignant image of failed Soviet dreams in the Third World is one re-
counted by Matusevich in his history of Soviet–Nigerian economic relations.
The USSR and Nigeria began planning the Ajaokuta Steel Plant in 1976,
reaching an agreement three years later with a scheduled opening of 1986.
Around that time, a sign outside the plant side advertised Ajaokuta Steel as
“The Path to True Industrialization”; behind it, a herd of goats stood calmly
out to pasture.99 A fitting image for grandiose Soviet plans gone awry, but one
that does not account for the cost of such dreams—in economic or ideologi-
cal terms—to the USSR itself. Those costs themselves suggest the benefits of
historians seeking to discover the Second World’s Third World.
The works considered here can provide both starting points and role mod-
els for a fuller history of the Second World’s Third World. So far many of the
best works have been bilateral or regional case studies, varying in scope and
source base. More bilateral accounts that use Soviet archives along with pub-
lished and archival documents from selected Third World countries would
be essential building blocks for a broader history of U.S.–Third World rela-
tions. Recent accounts by Boden (on Indonesia) and Mazov (on West Africa)
provide excellent models of bilateral studies that include and seek to integrate
formal diplomatic relations, economic and military aid, cultural relations,
and Soviet research institutions. The published portions of Andreas Hilger’s
study of Soviet–South Asian relations suggest a similarly broad analysis in the
works. (The Parallel History Project has brought Hilger together with Indian
scholars to gather primary sources and post them online.)100 An excellent
starting point is a collection of essays, Die Sowjetunion und die Dritte Welt
(The Soviet Union and the Third World [2009]), edited by Andreas Hilger.
Covering episodes that extend from Tel Aviv in 1948 through Kabul in 1979,
its essays trace an extraordinary range of historical actors, from Soviet friend-
ship societies to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MID) to the CPSU to the
98
Boden, “Cold War Economics,” 128, 119; Robinson and Dixon, “Soviet Development
Theory,” 600.
99
Matusevich, No Easy Row, 189–244.
100
For details, see www.php.isn.ethz.ch/collections/colltopic.cfm?lng=en&id=56154 (accessed
December 2008).
KGB. This geographic and organizational range, however, only suggests the
pressing need for more detailed studies tracing the complex nature of Soviet
interactions with Third World nations in the Cold War.
Researching histories of key Soviet institutions would provide different
building blocks toward a comprehensive understanding of Soviet–Third World
relations. The number of Soviet organizations involved in foreign relations
(broadly defined) means that the bilateral studies require work in archival col-
lections related to the Academy of Sciences, Council of Ministers, Gosplan,
and the Ministries of Foreign Affairs, Higher Education, and Foreign Trade—
not to mention party organs like the Commission on Ideology, Culture, and
International Party Movements. Detailed studies of these organizations (or
components of them, like individual universities and technical institutes or
individual institutes of the Academy of Sciences) would shed light on the
competing institutional interests and international visions that shaped Soviet
policies and practices in the Third World.
These bilateral and institutional histories would pave the way for broader
synthesis of Soviet–Third World relations, building upon Westad’s admirable
effort in The Global Cold War. Though Westad offered a broad argument about
the ideological factors shaping the Cold War, his empirical material focused
on Soviet (and Chinese and American) activities in Third World military hot-
spots in the USSR’s final decades. The cost of paying such close attention to
the international history of the Third World crises of the 1970s and 1980s,
however, was that he slighted the domestic impact of Soviet–Third World
relations as well as the range of contacts and connections beyond military aid.
It is at this nexus of domestic and international history that more in-
tensive study of Soviet–Third World relations has the greatest promise.
Expanding the geographic and thematic focus of the field has brought U.S.
diplomatic historians in much closer touch with a “mainstream” that had,
until the mid-1990s little interest in overseas connections or events. With
the push to “internationalize” American history—by 2011 over a dozen years
old—historians are abandoning long-held assumptions that the United States
shaped the world more than it was shaped by it; histories of slavery (its origins
and demise), westward expansion, and civil rights now require a transnational
perspective. Scholars of U.S. foreign relations have joined forces with those
in African-American, intellectual, cultural, and political history to retell that
history from a broader perspective.
Although some of the elements of this historiographic shift are unique
to the United States, other elements suggest future directions for historians
of the USSR. More attention to Soviet–Third World relations would be a
natural next step for those exploring the history of national, racial, religious,
and economic differentiation in Soviet politics and life. The “imperial turn”
has generated new questions about the expansion of a multinational polity—
questions that resonate with Soviet–Third World relations.101 Social histo-
ries of Third World students and visitors to the USSR and Soviet officials
overseas, furthermore, could contribute to discussions of Soviet subjectiv-
ity as distance and new experiences challenged Soviet ideas and identities.
And those scholars exploring what has been called the “modernity” paradigm
would find both confirming and disconfirming evidence in seeing how com-
peting modernities—Soviet, American, and European—were advertised, en-
acted, and received overseas.
Studies of the Second World’s Third World would fill obvious and im-
portant empirical gaps and could contribute meaningfully to current ap-
proaches to Soviet history. Much as Soviet actions in the Third World shaped
the course of Soviet history, scholarship on the geographic periphery can help
rewrite the mainstream history of the USSR.
Dept. of History / Mailstop 036

Brandeis University
Waltham, MA 02454 USA
engerman@brandeis.edu
101
See the discussions and citations in “The Imperial Turn,” Kritika 7, 4 (2006): 705–12.

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The Second World’s Third World

Soviet–Third World contacts in particular.8 By taking better account of the

social history.11 Scholars have tracked the process of “Americanization” as well

Scholarship on American modernization and development programs has

Chinese enthusiasm for confrontation with the capitalist world shaped

The Soviet Union, though leader of the world communist movement,

(1960)—in which 17 new countries came into being on the continent—

competition offered plenty of opportunities for Third World leaders to dic-

Moscow, Beijing, and Washington.52 In India, for instance, Soviet tractor

Entwicklungsländer,” in Prager Frühling: Das internationale Krisenjahre 1968, ed. Manfred

always worked through government agencies, including central planning

produced in the USSR aside from the occasional statistical compendium.

Studies of East–South relations would make a contribution to histories of

material on the topic into document collections on Soviet–African relations.78

outside Moscow, furthermore, made Lumumba University seem tolerant and

Brutents echoed a confidential 1964 report that accused Khrushchev of

Dept. of History / Mailstop 036

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