In 1986, Sue Dobson, a younger white girl from Pretoria, was recruited by the African Nationwide Congress (ANC) to be a spy inside the South African apartheid regime.
As a part of her mission, she was flown to Moscow for specialist coaching.
“It was a really intensive coaching course,” mentioned Dobson, who’s now retired and lives in England. “[It] coated find out how to choose up surveillance, issues like secret writing, pictures, methods for being out and about. There have been a number of road workout routines the place I’d exit and I’d need to establish six or eight individuals who have been following me, both on foot or in a automotive, a tram or in a practice carriage, something like that.”
She didn’t have a lot free time, however managed to spend a couple of days in Leningrad, now named St Petersburg.
“It should have been winter 1986 and all the pieces was snow-covered,” she remembered. “It was completely lovely.”
When she returned to South Africa the next 12 months, she was employed as a reporter within the Bureau of Data, the apartheid regime’s propaganda wing. The job gave her entry to ministers and different high-profile info. However in 1989, the authorities found her household’s connections to the ANC and her cowl was blown.
“I used to be instructed to remain the place I used to be and that I’d be accompanied again to Pretoria in a airplane with any individual from International Affairs, which was a euphemism for the intelligence division, and I made a decision that I wasn’t going to hold round,” mentioned Dobson, whose memoir is titled Burned: The Spy South Africa By no means Caught.
“The sport was up, and I made my escape through the evening … I needed to make my solution to Botswana, and the Soviet diplomats there helped me and put me on a airplane to the UK.”
Dobson mentioned she didn’t know sufficient in regards to the “nuances and the subtleties of the scenario” to touch upon Russia’s present full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Whereas Western powers have largely condemned fashionable Russia’s onslaught on its neighbour, sympathy for the Kremlin has come from a maybe sudden quarter: Africa.
Solely half of African governments condemned Russia on the United Nations in 2022, the 12 months Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the battle.
Consultants say that this development lies in Moscow’s historic championing of anti-imperialist causes.
Russia’s pushback in opposition to Western affect in Africa dates again to the nineteenth century. Whereas different European powers plundered and divided the continent through the Scramble for Africa, the Russian Empire took the aspect of their fellow Orthodox Christians in Ethiopia within the 1895-96 Italo-Ethiopian battle, offering weapons and different help.
Nonetheless, in accordance with Oleksandr Polianichev, a Ukrainian historian of the Russian Empire, Russian involvement has been vastly exaggerated.
“A lot of this narrative traces again to Nikolai Leontiev, a Russian adventurer who arrived in Ethiopia in early 1895 and bluffed his approach into the internal circle of [Ethiopian Emperor] Menelik II,” Polianichev instructed Al Jazeera.
“In his account of the Ethiopian resistance to Italy, Leontiev lavishly described the essential function he claimed to have performed on the battlefield, portraying himself as one of many architects of the victory on the Battle of Adwa. This was, nonetheless, a self-serving fiction.”
Leontiev is commonly credited with delivering a cargo of weapons and ammunition that helped Ethiopia repel the Italian colonists.
“Whereas the Russian authorities did certainly ship these weapons upon Leontiev’s request – previous Berdan rifles now not wanted by the Russian military, which was adopting the brand new Mosin rifles – they by no means reached Ethiopia in time,” Polianichev added. “The steamship transporting them was detained by the Italians, and the cargo didn’t arrive in Ethiopia till after the battle had ended.”
Although Russia’s naval capabilities meant colonising Africa for themselves was by no means a sensible prospect, that didn’t cease Nikolai Ashinov, chief of a band of Cossacks, from touchdown on the shores of Djibouti in 1889 and proclaiming it Russian land. The French, nonetheless, had already established a colony and rapidly decimated Ashinov’s settlement by bombarding it with warships.
Later, through the Chilly Struggle, the Soviets aided pleasant governments in Angola, Mozambique and the Congo in conflicts in opposition to factions backed by Western powers, although not all the time efficiently.
The USSR was additionally an ally of Egypt below Basic Gamal Abdel Nasser, providing arms offers and infrastructure help.
“The Soviet Union had ideological and sensible motives for supporting anti-colonial actions and decolonisation within the World South,” defined Kimberly St Julian-Varnon, an American historian of the USSR.
“On one hand, it was preventing america and Western Europe to point out that socialism supplied the most effective type of society and authorities. Soviet-style socialism was to be a blueprint for creating the economies and governments of recent states following the top of empire.
“Then again, the Soviet Union benefitted from commerce agreements that bolstered its export of products to allied international locations and gave the USSR a variety of pure sources from the World South that it imported effectively under market costs. Soviet infrastructure tasks in Africa have been mutually helpful in that the Soviet Union can be repaid in type by the recipient state.”
As a part of its outreach to African nations, the Patrice Lumumba College, named after the Congolese chief, was opened in Moscow, the place from the Sixties round 500 scholarships have been granted yearly to African college students.
However some mentioned they skilled racism. In 1963, Edmund Assare-Addo, a Ghanaian pupil, was reportedly overwhelmed to demise over an alleged interracial relationship, prompting a uncommon protest on Pink Sq..
“This was a evident contradiction to the Soviet propaganda of their residence international locations, which promoted the nation because the antithesis of European colonial powers,” mentioned St Julian-Varnon.
“Often, experiences about racism within the Soviet Union made it to Western media and undermined Soviet assaults on American anti-Black racism. Nonetheless, African college students continued to check within the Soviet Union and Russian Federation regardless of the racism due to the alternatives they believed such an training supplied.”
Whereas apartheid propaganda portrayed the USSR as coveting South Africa’s sources, the Soviets supported the ANC and its armed wing, uMkhonto weSizwe (MK), because the Sixties, arming and coaching operatives similar to Sue Dobson.
“Definitely, I believe that the ANC wouldn’t overlook the function that the Soviet Union performed in enabling the ANC to come back to energy,” Dobson mentioned.
“I believe that it’s one thing that’s fairly revered and honoured. There are vital historic ties between the ANC and the USSR, going proper again to the very first members of the ANC who visited Moscow very early on and took a leaf out of the Bolsheviks’ e book concerning revolution and the liberation motion.”
The ANC is at present South Africa’s ruling get together, and whereas sustaining a impartial stance, the federal government has averted condemning Russia outright, maybe reflecting lingering sympathies as many senior ANC members both skilled or studied within the USSR, which Russia is seen because the successor state of.
‘The attraction of Russia’s anti-colonial narrative’
Extra overt pro-Russian help is seen on the grassroots stage.
In February, a small rally of South African Ukrainians in Durban was interrupted by counterprotesters waving Russian flags and taking part in the meme music Sigma Boy, a viral pop hit written by a Russian composer.
Russian flags aren’t an unfamiliar sight elsewhere on the continent.
Moscow has forgiven the money owed of a number of African international locations, and supplied boots on the bottom to deal with safety considerations in international locations similar to Mali and the Central African Republic, the place native leaders have welcomed the help regardless of allegations of atrocities by Russian mercenaries.
“The attraction of Russia’s ‘anti-colonial’ narrative lies in its usefulness to societies and ruling elites throughout Eurasia and past, who’re prepared to simply accept and even embrace it so long as it aligns with their very own political sensibilities,” mentioned historian Polianichev.
“It’s not taken with no consideration as a result of Russia was really ‘anti-imperialist’ previously, however as a result of it actively opposes the West within the current. Ought to the political local weather shift, the skeletons in Russia’s closet might be simply as simply dropped at gentle.”
