Thom Loyd. Review of Iandolo, Alessandro, Arrested Development: The Soviet Union in Ghana, Guinea, and Mali, 1955–1968

BOOK REVIEW

Arrested Development: The Soviet Union in Ghana, Guinea, and Mali, 1955–1968

by Alessandro Iandolo

Cornell University Press
2022. xv + 287 pp.
(cloth), ISBN 978-1-5017-6443-1.

Reviewed by Thom Loyd (Augusta University)

In his 1955 novel, Flamingo Feather, the Afrikaner writer Laurens van der Post painted a sinister picture of Soviet influence in Africa, one in which the Soviet Union used whatever underhand means it could to spread its revolution across the globe. “Skilfully chosen, these instruments of a Tartar [sic] inquisition came in hundreds from all over the world with hurt, hangdog looks, or starry eyes to learn the latest dirty method of spreading chaos and unrest in the mind and machinery of man,†van der Post wrote of the Africans tricked into this devious plan.[1] Though melodramatic, his imagined Soviet plot had a lot of purchase in the middle of the last century, when Western intelligence agencies and political scientists alike tended to view the Soviet Union through this kind of conspiratorial lens.

In this thoroughly researched book, Alessandro Iandolo picks apart this myth of a crusading Soviet Union and its plan for an African takeover. Focusing on Soviet economic ties with Ghana, Guinea, and Mali, Iandolo persuasively demonstrates that the Soviet Union forsook revolutionary Marxism in favor of an approach that shared much with the import-substitution path of development taken by other countries of the Global South during the twentieth century. In Arrested Development, we are left with an image of Soviet-African relations defined not by Cold War conspiracy but rather by bureaucratic banality and dysfunction.

Iandolo’s analysis succeeds in making important interventions into this crowded field of study. As well as covering this older grand narrative of Soviet subversion, Iandolo also engages with a more recent historiographical turn that emphasizes the weakness of the Soviet economy to suggest that trade with the rest of the world was an attempt to integrate the Soviet Union into the capitalist world market. As he writes, the Soviet “vision was ambitious, but it was neither transforming the world in the USSR’s image nor transforming the USSR in the capitalist world’s image†(p. 6).

Instead, as Iandolo argues, the Soviet Union’s approach to a “non-capitalist path of development†eschewed the emphasis on rapid industrialization associated with the Soviet Union’s own road to modernity for one that emphasized light industry and, more importantly, agriculture. This was despite the desires of Kwame Nkrumah, Ahmed Sékou Touré, and Modibo Keïta for exactly the sort of grand projects that in some respects had drawn them to Soviet development in the first place. As Iandolo puts it, “when interacting with the Soviet Union the governments of Ghana, Guinea, and Mali expected a Stalinist five-year plan but were given NEP [New Economic Policy] instead†(p. 226).

However, this is not to say that the Soviet Union abandoned ideology. In a field that has tended to view Soviet-African relations through the binary lens of either ideology or pragmatism, Iandolo convincingly suggests that socialist ideology tempered by pragmatic considerations on the ground provided the underlying logic of Soviet development in all three of these African states. As he writes: “The Soviet philosophy of development put the state before the market and the collective before the individual. This was a precise political choice that corresponded to deeply held beliefs in Moscow and equally deeply held ambitions in Accra, Bamako, and Conakry†(p. 229).

Iandolo lays out his arguments across six chapters. The first three provide the deeper background to Soviet development both at home and as it developed as a tool of foreign policy after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953. Chapters 4 and 5 do the bulk of the heavy lifting analytically, with chapter 4 focusing in detail on the elaboration of Soviet development plans in Ghana, Guinea, and Mali, and chapter 5 demonstrating how these lofty ideas quickly foundered. Chapter 6 looks beyond the failure of Soviet development in West Africa and traces these earlier failures to later Soviet aid efforts in the developing world.

Perhaps Arrested Development’s most interesting intervention, at least from the Soviet perspective, is the chronology that Iandolo has chosen. Iandolo dates Soviet disillusionment with Africa to long before Mikhail Gorbachev announced the Soviet Union’s turn away from the world and toward Europe; according to the author, it predates even Nikita Khrushchev’s ouster in 1964. Already by the early 1960s key figures within the Soviet Union had become skeptical of the possibility of a “non-capitalist path to development†in these countries. In other words, it took little more than a decade after Stalin died, according to Iandolo, for the Soviet Union to fall in and out of love with the Third World development project, at least in Africa. The implications of this argument—supported here by a wealth of documentary evidence—are substantial. From this perspective, the Soviet turn toward military aid in the 1970s was not simply a result of the change of guard in the Kremlin but a pragmatic pivot, again guided by ideology, based on past experience and failures.

Though there is much to commend here, in other areas Iandolo sells himself short. One notable area is in the extensive archival work the author has undertaken. One of the strengths of this work, as noted by Elidor Mëhilli in a blurb on the dustjacket, is the multilingual, multi-sited source base on which Iandolo draws. However, the methodological importance of this is sometimes lost in the text, a reality reinforced by the publisher’s preference for endnotes over footnotes, which obscures the provenance of Iandolo’s analysis. To take one example, as Soviet historians we are trained to be somewhat skeptical of rote, bureaucratic language that seems to peddle the official line, such as diplomatic notes that paint a picture of an adoring world looking on in awe at the Soviet Union’s great achievements. However, here Iandolo draws on internal Malian government sources that seem to suggest that the often-obsequious notes sent from Soviet posts abroad were based, at least in part, on a genuine sense on the part of the Malians that Soviet development was all it promised to be. This has the potential to contribute to our understanding of the affective basis of Soviet internationalism, alongside other recent work by the likes of Christine Varga-Harris.[2]

Similarly, Iandolo is keen to stress that this is a work of Soviet history. Again, this may perhaps be a little modest. There is much here that will be of interest to scholars of West Africa, particularly those seeking to understand how “African socialism†developed alongside, and diverged from, arguably the most important socialist state of the twentieth century.

Overall, Arrested Development is a welcome addition to the growing literature on the global Cold War and Soviet internationalism that provides a roadmap for working internationally across both the Global South and post-Soviet archives to better understand Soviet realities.

Notes

[1]. Laurens van der Post, Flamingo Feather (New York: William Morrow, 1955), 239.

[2]. Christine Varga-Harris, “The Epistolarium: Socialist Internationalism Writ Small—Friendship, Solidarity, and Support between Women in the Soviet Union and in Decolonizing Countries, 1950s-1960s,†in Socialist Internationalism and the Gritty Politics of the Particular: Second-Third World Spaces in the Cold War, ed. Kristin Roth-Ey (London: Bloomsbury, 2023), 97-118.

[Reproduced from H-Net under a Creative Commons License]