INTRODUCTION
Philip E. Muehlenbeck and Natalia Telepneva
‘The Middle East: The Trojan Horse’ blared the headline of a 7 November 1955 story in Time magazine, the most popular news weekly in the USA, with a circulation of more than 5 million copies per week. Time's anonymous authors editorialized, ‘In the port of Alexandria last week, at piers sealed off from prying eyes, Egyptian longshoremen carefully uncrated a Trojan horse. It came from Czechoslovakia, but bore Moscow's greeting card’.1 The delivery came as part of an arms deal in which Prague sold Egypt a massive amount of weaponry – including various types of military aircraft, armoured personnel carriers, tanks, artillery guns, rocket launchers and anti-tank guns – for the price of US$45.7 million. Egypt was to pay 25 per cent by the end of March 1956, while the Soviet Union underwrote the rest by offering Egypt a 30-year loan at 2-per cent interest.2 The news sent shock waves around the world when Egypt's radical nationalist leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, announced the deal on 27 September 1955.3 Western officials and observers, as Time's article shows, considered the arms deal a ‘Trojan Horse’ that brought the Soviet Union into Egypt via Czechoslovakia.4
This belief extended to all the Soviet Union's relations with its Eastern and Central European allies. When, on 14 May 1955, the leaders of the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Albania signed the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance – formally inaugurating what became known as the ‘Warsaw Pact’ – most Western observers believed that the alliance represented nothing more than a ‘cardboard castle’, a superficial entity that masked Soviet domination of its satellites.5 Were the countries in Eastern and Central Europe actually the proverbial Trojan Horse for Soviet policy in the Third World? Based on newly declassified documents from those countries the authors in this volume deal with this question as they investigate how non-Soviet Warsaw Pact (NSWP) countries – the GDR, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Poland – responded to decolonization and the rise of the Third World.6
The term ‘Third World’ was first coined by the non-communist European Left in the 1940s. It was meant to represent a ‘third force’ or ‘third way’ in world politics, as distinct from Western-style capitalism and Soviet communism. By the 1970s, the ‘Third World’ came to be defined as countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America that were bound together by common history, had experienced various forms of foreign domination and faced similar economic conditions. The ‘Third World’ became a political project that sought to rebalance the power disparity in international economic relations for countries outside of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) – the economic substructures established to support the economies of the ‘First’ and ‘Second’ worlds respectively.7 While Soviet bloc officials did not like the term ‘Third World’, and used it only in inverted commas, it is adopted throughout this volume in a way that was commonly understood from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s.
The conversation about the nature of the Soviet Union's relationship with its Eastern and Central European allies started soon after the establishment of the Warsaw Pact in 1955. In The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict, Zbigniew Brzezinski was the first to suggest the emancipation of NSWP countries from ‘satellites’ into ‘junior allies’, which challenged the view of the Warsaw Pact as an impenetrable monolith.8 However, he still argued that the Warsaw Pact was a forum for the articulation of support for Soviet foreign-policy initiatives. He thus barely touched upon (with the exception of China) the implications of this emancipation for the foreign policy of NSWP states in the Third World. Brzezinski's and other studies were written at a time when primary source materials were unavailable, leaving much room for speculation. An emerging consensus (which was shared by US Government intelligence at the time) was that Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland and to a lesser extent Romania were little more than surrogates of Soviet foreign policy who took instructions from Moscow and had little autonomy in the direction of their foreign-policy initiatives. This viewpoint can be summed up in a quote by Andrzej Korbonski, one of the scholars of this genre, who in 1987 wrote, ‘I assume that the Kremlin is able to control the Third World policy [of its Eastern European allies] to a fairly substantial degree’.9 As a result, several dozen books published in the 1970s and 1980s focused on Soviet bloc activities in the developing world, but the NSWP countries made only rare appearances.10 The NSWP states' general absence from this historiography can be illustrated by the fact that shockingly (given the title of the book) only one out of ten chapters in The Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and the Third World, edited by Roger Kanet, actually discusses the role of Moscow's junior allies.11
The end of the Cold War and the subsequent opening of archives in Eastern and Central Europe has reshaped our understanding of the Warsaw Pact and the foreign policies of the NSWP countries. One development has been the recovery of the agency of the so-called ‘junior members in the international system’ that, in the words of Tony Smith, ‘took actions that tried to block, moderate, and end the epic contest [and] also took actions that played a key role in expanding, intensifying, and prolonging the struggle between East and West’.12 Hope Harrison's Driving the Soviets Up the Wall provides a striking example, from inside the Soviet bloc, of how East German leader Walter Ulbricht managed to convince the reluctant Soviets to construct what became the key symbol of the Cold War – the Berlin Wall.13 Another development, partly sparked by the publication of Arne Westad's The Global Cold War, has concerned the greater importance attributed to the Third World in the history of the Cold War.14 A growing body of scholarship has dealt with the ways that ‘junior members in the international system’ such as Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam and China, to name a few key examples, shaped the way that the Cold War unfolded, evolved and ended.15 In a parallel development, historians of transnationalism have focused on the roles played by international organizations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), multinational corporations and experts on both sides of the Iron Curtain in the construction of the post-1945 world order. Historians of transnationalism have expanded the definition of internationalism beyond the study of liberal intellectuals to include ideas, people and institutions in the socialist world. An emerging body of scholarship has offered fresh perspectives on the ways that the socialist experiment opened up opportunities for experts and workers to build socialism abroad, including in the Third World.16
Historians of Eastern and Central Europe have thus begun to write the history of the region into international, transnational and global history. Many have started to explore the motivations and actions of individual NSWP countries in exchanges between the North and South or as agents who deployed new openings to the Third World in the 1950s in pursuit of self-interest.17 Recent years, especially, have seen an outpouring of works that analyse the policies of East Germany in the Third World in the context of its competition with West Germany.18 From these works, we know now that the Warsaw Pact was characterized by substantial debates on policy in the Third World, and that Moscow was often unwilling – or unable – to control the policies of the NSWP states there. As Laurien Crump has shown in The Warsaw Pact Reconsidered, the establishment of the Pact inadvertently provided the NSWP countries with opportunities to emancipate themselves from the Soviet grip and to influence bloc policy on such issues as the Sino–Soviet split and the Vietnam War.19
However, the scholarship that deals with the engagement of state-socialist East–Central Europe still suffers from a number of limitations. Firstly, the field is dominated by studies on the GDR and its competition with the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). Other NSWP countries, in particular Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria, receive – with only a few exceptions – little attention. Secondly, international historians have only just started to consider the economic conditions of the NSWP countries in their engagement with the Third World, especially in the light of recent debate about the place of the Soviet bloc in the world economy in view of the publication of Oscar Sanchez-Sibony's Red Globalization.20 Finally, there is still a significant disconnect between diplomatic histories of nation states in East–Central Europe and the emerging scholarship on transnational exchanges and postwar socialist internationalism. Drawing on newly declassified archival resources now available in Moscow, Prague, Sofia, Berlin, Budapest, Warsaw and Bucharest, this volume aims to fill some of these gaps. While contributors differ in their interpretations of motivations for individual countries amongst the NSWP members and their relations with Moscow, the majority point to a revisionist reinterpretation of the place of NSWP countries in the Warsaw Pact and their policies in the Third World, thus contributing to what James Hershberg terms a ‘retroactive de-bipolarization’ of the Cold War.21
This volume is arranged around key themes in rough chronological order. Part I highlights how the political leadership in the Warsaw Pact countries sought to ‘re-discover’ the Third World, as a wave of decolonization and revolutionary movements swept across Asia, Africa and Latin America in the 1950s. Part II investigates the roles that various groups of elites – journalists, scientists, diplomats, teachers and spies – played in Warsaw Pact engagement with the Third World. Part III aims to provide an overview of the diplomatic and commercial engagement of individual NSWP countries with various regions in the Third World. Chronologically, the volume extends from Nikita Khrushchev's seminal speech at the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU in February 1956 and goes up to the signature of the 1975 Helsinki Declaration – the highpoint of European detente in the 1970s. The 1956–75 period is significant because the transformation of the Warsaw Pact coincided with decolonization and the emergence of the Third World as a political project, with the dissolution of the Portuguese Empire in Africa in 1975 marking the end of formal European colonialism. The year 1975 coincided with peak optimism about the prospects of socialism in the Third World – at just the point at which a long era of economic and psychological stagnation (zastoi) settled in to dominate domestic life in the Soviet bloc until reform and the opening up of the mid-1980s.22 The period covered in this volume thus provides a rich laboratory from which to explore the policy of NSWP states at this key historical juncture.
Part I The Re-Discovery of the Third World
The ‘re-discovery’ of the Third World in the Eastern bloc became possible due to leadership changes in the Soviet Union after the death of Joseph Stalin in March 1953 and his replacement by Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev as the new first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CC CPSU). The Soviet Union had a long history of support for socialist revolution abroad, dating back to the foundation of the Third Communist International (the Comintern) in 1919. However, preoccupied with reconstruction and the emergence of the Cold War in Europe, Stalin was not particularly interested in developing contacts with non-communist leaders in Africa, Asia and Latin America after the end of World War II. The rapid decolonization and social revolutions that swept through the Third World in the late 1950s offered new opportunities for Stalin's successors. A pragmatic party apparatchik who had risen through the ranks as a Party boss in Soviet Ukraine and Moscow, Khrushchev saw in decolonization an opportunity to ‘extend a helping hand’ to the newly independent nations and thus to gain allies amongst Third World leaders.23 Khrushchev's pragmatism fitted well with his belief, held by many Bolsheviks of his generation, that the Third World was the new frontier for the expansion of socialist revolution and that it was the duty of the Soviet Union to help.24 He also believed that it was possible to reconcile an improvement of relations with the West with an activist strategy in the Third World. On a 1955 tour of Asia, Khrushchev appealed to the West to ‘verify in practice whose system is better’ and ‘compete without war’.25
Khrushchev also wanted to move away from the model of Soviet dominance, strictly controlling the USSR's satellites, to a more equitable relationship based on the principle of ‘proletarian internationalism’ and ‘socialist friendship’. This approach started with China: whereas Stalin had treated China as a ‘junior ally’ in a socialist empire, Khrushchev greatly expanded transfers of economic, military and technical assistance to Beijing, and sought to redefine the relationship on a more equal footing.26 Khrushchev envisioned that with the establishment of the Warsaw Pact in May 1955, the NSWP countries could play more independent roles in foreign policy in order to become credible allies to the Soviet Union on the world stage. In a January 1956 meeting of Eastern European communist parties in Moscow, he proposed that Eastern European countries should take action in foreign policy and then Moscow would provide support in what Csaba Békés coined the ‘active foreign policy doctrine’.27 Khrushchev's proposals found a positive reception amongst the NSWP countries, with the GDR, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania all engaged in active discussion of policy options.28 Soviet policies in Eastern and Central Europe dovetailed with domestic changes in the Soviet Union known as the ‘Thaw’, as thousands of political prisoners were amnestied and released from the Stalinist labour camps and Soviet intellectuals were to a certain extent allowed to challenge the rigid Stalinist orthodoxy in the arts. The Soviets opened foreign tourism to the USSR and cultural exchange with a wider range of actors in the West and the Third World. However, there were limits to the ‘Thaw’, as Soviet East European allies soon discovered.
Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin's crimes at the CPSU Twentieth Congress in February 1956 sent shockwaves throughout the Soviet bloc. In Hungary and Poland, it led to protests and strengthened those reformists in the leadership of the communist parties who sought to redefine their relationship with the Soviet bloc. In October 1956, the Polish leader, Władysław Gomułka, managed to negotiate a new relationship with the Soviet leadership and thus avoided intervention. In Hungary, a series of anti-Soviet protests turned increasingly violent. With the newly appointed reformist chairman of the Council of Ministers, Imre Nagy, unable to calm street protests that threatened the disintegration of the communist regime in Hungary, on 31 October, the CC CPSU Politburo approved an invasion. On 4 November, Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest crushing the revolution. Nagy was replaced by János Kádár and executed in a secret trial in June 1958.29 While intervention in Hungary indicated the limits of ‘national roads to socialism’ available to the NSWP states and established a number of ‘red lines’ that the Soviets were unwilling to cross, the doctrine of ‘active foreign policy’ remained in place. In fact, in the 1960s, the Warsaw Pact developed various ways to coordinate political, economic and cultural policies in the Third World in a variety of bilateral and multilateral forums, as contacts between newly independent countries and liberation movements in Asia, Africa and Latin America and NSWP countries expanded exponentially in the late 1950s and 1960s.30
The period covered in Part I coincided with momentous change around the world. The foundation of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in October 1949 and the withdrawal of French troops from Indochina in 1954 heralded the end of European colonialism in Asia and revived the prospects of socialist revolution. In Africa, the rapid disintegration of the British, French and Belgian empires led to the emergence of a string of new independent states that entered the United Nations and other international organizations by the mid-1960s. The victory of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 heralded a new era in the constellation of forces in Latin America. In the first Afro–Asian conference in Bandung, Indonesia in April 1955, the delegates from 29 mainly newly independent states called for unity on the basis of self-determination, mutual economic assistance and neutrality, thus laying the foundations of the Non-Alignment and other Third Worldist projects that aimed to supersede Cold War divides.31 While delegates at Bandung envisioned that the ideology of non-alignment would contribute to world peace, the rising importance of the Third World actually led to the intensification of the Cold War. The period between 1956 and 1963, in particular, coincided with an unprecedented number of crises – Suez, the Taiwan Straits, Berlin, U-2, Laos, Congo and Cuba.32 The contributors to this volume tackle how the leadership of the NSWP countries responded to the changes in the international environment, the first diplomatic initiatives that they took and the challenges that they encountered.
One of the first NSWP countries to benefit from the leadership change in the Soviet Union was the GDR. In 1955, the Soviets officially recognized the GDR and established formal diplomatic relations with the FRG. From the work of Hope Harrison and others, we already know how skilfully Walter Ulbricht, the first secretary of the Socialist Unity Party (SED), managed to leverage the GDR's key location in order to pursue the survival of East German socialism in its competition with the FRG. Similarly, Lorena De Vita looks at the origins of competition between East and West Germany in the Third World as she explores the GDR's response to the 1956 Suez Crisis. The Suez Crisis started in August 1956 when the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser proclaimed the nationalization of the Suez Canal Company in response to Western refusal to fund the construction of the Aswan Dam. In October, Israel, Britain and France invaded Egypt in order to retake control. De Vita describes an extraordinary public campaign – the first of its kind – that the East German leadership launched in support of Egypt, highlighting the FRG's links with Israel in an attempt to break out of its own diplomatic isolation. She shows that the SED leadership was willing to go to great lengths – up to the point of sending East German volunteers to fight in Egypt – in order to achieve diplomatic recognition from Cairo, with the Soviets providing a moderating influence.
While Khrushchev's commitment to socialist East Germany allowed Ulbricht to secure (measured) Soviet support for its foreign-policy initiatives, it was Poland that underwent a particularly significant transformation after the events of 1956. Recent research has focused particularly on the Polish leader, Władysław Gomułka, whose ability to negotiate a new relationship with the Soviets in October 1956 allowed for a large degree of independence within the Soviet bloc. While most research on Polish diplomatic history after 1956 focuses on Warsaw's relationship with the West, the Soviet Union and Asia, Marek Rutkowski analyses how various foreign and domestic policy concerns connected during Prime Minister Józef Cyrankiewicz's trip to Asia in 1957. Rutkowski shows how Cyrankiewicz tried to establish close relations with Asian countries as a way to strengthen Poland's position within the Soviet bloc, and also finds circumstantial evidence that, in India, Cyrankiewicz sought support for the Rapacki Plan, one of the most well-known of Poland's postwar diplomatic initiatives. Rutkowski's account reveals the Polish leadership engaged in a careful balancing act, eager to solidify its new-found autonomy and yet unwilling to upset a balance with Moscow.
While the diplomatic initiatives of the GDR and Poland have been previously tackled by international historians, Jan Koura and Robert Anthony Waters Jr, provide insight into a topic that has been almost completely ignored by historians – the role of the Soviet bloc in Latin America. A known ‘brand’ in the region, Czechoslovakia was well poised to take advantage of Khrushchev's opening up to the Third World. Not unlike the GDR's Walter Ulbricht and Bulgaria's Todor Zhivkov, the first secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party (CCP), Antonín Novotný, staked his political survival after 1956 on a close alliance with the Soviet Union. Koura and Waters reveal that Prague remained highly enthusiastic about the revolutionary potential in Latin America up until 1966, as they analyse how Czechoslovakia tried to forge a new and active role in the region, which included the multiplication of business ties, expansion of trade and the transfer of arms. When Prague decided to supply weapons to Cuba, this accorded it a greater status and respect from the Soviets. The story of Czechoslovak relations with Cheddi and Janet Jagan, the leaders of the left-leaning People's Progressive Party of British Guiana, shows not only how much Czechoslovak policy developed based on these assessments but also the increasingly important role that Prague played in the region at that time. The chapter illuminates the fact that Czechoslovakia went far beyond what the ‘businesslike’ Soviets (in the words of Janet Jagan) were willing to do in the case of British Guiana.
Larry Watts focuses on the diplomacy of Romania in the Third World. Arguing that Romanian behaviour in the Warsaw Pact represented ‘not so much autonomy as mutiny’, Watts contends that Bucharest saw in the Third World an ally in its endeavour to obstruct Soviet unilateralism. This was particularly the case during the 1967 Six Day War, when Bucharest not only failed to break off relations with Israel but also refused to allow its territory to be used to transport military supplies to Soviet allies in the region. Unsurprisingly, the Soviet Union and its loyalist allies saw Romania's policies in the Middle East as a direct challenge. Moscow tried to isolate Bucharest in international forums, but stopped short of undertaking drastic action. Romania pursued policies that countered Soviet interests, not only in the Middle East but also in Africa and Latin America. Watts argues that the Third World became the ‘central pillar’ of Romania's soft power, rather than simply an attempt to counter Soviet hegemony.
The authors in Part I advance our understanding of how NSWP countries used the opening accorded by de-Stalinization and Khrushchev's ‘active foreign policy’ doctrine to forge new forms of engagement with countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. New activist engagement in the Third World was crucial to the NSWP states asserting their agency in foreign affairs, with Moscow sometimes having to curb the enthusiasm of its allies in the diplomatic arena. If chapters in Part I deal with high-level diplomatic initiatives, the contributors to Part II look at those men and women across the Soviet bloc who became actively involved in international initiatives as the NSWP countries turned their attention to the Third World.
Part II ‘Intermediaries’: Spies, Journalists, Doctors, Teachers and Diplomats in the Third World
The mid- to late 1950s was a period of opening up towards the outside world, with students, scientists, musicians and artists from Africa, Asia and Latin America for the first time pouring in across the Iron Curtain. Some would stay for long periods in order to receive education in a wide range of arts and sciences or for military training. Others would come to participate in an ever-expanding range of events – conferences, seminars, festivals or simply tours – all organized in order to showcase the achievements of socialism and deepen contacts with Third World elites. In July 1957, the CC CPSU sponsored the World Youth Festival in Moscow, which for the first time brought young people from Africa, Asia and Latin America in contact with thousands of Soviet citizens, heralding the dawn of a new era. Similar events, albeit of modest proportions, would become common across the Eastern bloc. Newspapers, magazines, radio programmes and TV broadcasts filled up with reports about the lives of peoples in Asia, Africa and Latin America. When two Czechoslovak adventurers, Jiri Hanselka and Miroslav Zikmund, travelled across Africa, Asia, Latin America and Oceania in a silver Tatra 87, their regular radio show attracted enormous audiences and their travelogues a huge readership across the Soviet bloc, making them the best-selling writers in twentieth-century Eastern Europe. The 1950s thus saw a multiplication of exchanges between Eastern and Central Europeans and foreigners.33
Travelling and working abroad was still closely regulated by communist party officials, and thus remained a marker of privilege bestowed upon a narrow elite. The men and women who travelled or worked abroad – journalists, teachers, medical professionals, economic advisors, scientists, artists, writers, ballet dancers, opera singers, diplomats and spies – were all carefully selected and vetted for their particular mission, which was to serve the cause of socialism. At the same time, the motivations of those men and women who went abroad in various capacities differed. While postings in the West generally remained the preferred option for elites across the Soviet bloc, the opening up to the Third World provided opportunities for personal career advancement. For some, working abroad accorded opportunities for earning extra cash and gaining access to Western consumer goods. Others were attracted by a sense of adventure and a desire to see and experience foreign cultures. However, for many men and women across the Eastern bloc, Third World revolutions and national liberation movements seemed to validate the socialist experiment. Many were genuinely convinced about the superiority of socialism over capitalism and believed it was their ‘internationalist duty’ to help the emerging nations throw off the shackles of colonial and neocolonial exploitation and help to advance the cause of socialist-style modernization in the Third World.34 While engagement with anti-colonial and anti-imperialist campaigns had its precedents in interwar Soviet Union and East–Central Europe, the purges of European communist parties and the Comintern during the Great Terror of 1936–8, the trauma and loss of the Great War and Stalinization in Eastern and Central Europe after World War II meant that Soviet bloc countries were lacking in cadres with knowledge or contacts in the Third World.
The men and women who travelled or lived abroad fulfilled multiple roles, sometimes under double identities. One group that was at the forefront of Eastern bloc propaganda efforts in the Third World comprised the journalists who staffed the press agencies of the Soviet bloc – the Soviet TASS and APN, Cuba's Prensa Latina, Czechoslovakia's Četeka, and the GDR's Allgemeine Deutsche Nachrichtendienst (ADN). The journalists usually lived away from the embassies, so they had greater room for manoeuvre and thus better opportunities to launch personal relations with the heads of local media services. Unsurprisingly, press agencies were often used as a cover for Eastern bloc intelligence agencies, with journalists – but also diplomats, and representatives of Soviet cultural organizations abroad – actually being officers of the Soviet KGB, the Czechoslovak StB or the GDR's Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Stasi). University campuses and hospitals also offered opportunities for informal engagement and exchange. The four chapters in Part II provide examples as to the roles that these elites – journalists, spies, teachers and medical professionals – played in conducting NSWP policy in the Third World.
Soviet and Czechoslovak intelligence officers are at the centre of Natalia Telepneva's chapter on the Congo Crisis, 1960–4. The Congo, formally a Belgian colony, became embroiled in a crisis that saw an army mutiny, a general strike, the secession of the resource-rich Katanga province and Belgian intervention all follow in quick succession after the country became independent in June 1960. Telepneva follows a small group of Czechoslovak and Soviet intelligence officers who worked together for the first time in sub-Saharan Africa in order to support the Congo's first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, in a country that quickly turned into a Cold War hotspot. By 1961, the Soviets realized that they were neither willing nor capable of seriously resisting Western action in the Congo. In this context, intelligence became the key way to protect their allies in the country – a Cold War ‘on the cheap’. Soviet and Czechoslovak intelligence officers tried, despite all the odds, to recruit informants and agents and maintain contacts with the pro-Lumumbist opposition, whilst at the same time facing pressures from Moscow and Prague. While these efforts ultimately failed, covert operations became an established foreign-policy practice in Africa where Western power and influence greatly outweighed that of the Soviet bloc.
George Roberts analyses how East German journalists and diplomats tried to work towards full diplomatic recognition of the GDR in Tanzania. In 1964, a chain of events in East Africa created a situation in which, after a protracted diplomatic struggle, Dar es Salaam became the first sub-Saharan capital to house representatives of both German states. Roberts analyses how the GDR employed Öffentlichkeitarbeit (publicity work) in order to achieve full diplomatic status in the late 1960s – a complicated set of measures that included a campaign to discredit the FRG as a successor to imperial Germany. In particular, he focuses on a group of ADN journalists in Dar es Salaam and their relationships with local elites. The GDR's propaganda efforts, argues Roberts, produced mostly negative results, aggravated by the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, which was met with opprobrium in Dar es Salaam. In the end, Tanzania's decision to open full relations with the GDR in December 1972 had ‘nothing to do’ with East Germany's policies in Africa. Roberts portrays the GDR as a ‘scavenger state’, whose policies were constantly contingent on local dynamics.
If Telepneva and Roberts deal with such ‘usual suspects’ in intra-governmental exchanges as diplomats and spies, Iris Borowy focuses on the backgrounds, motivations and actions of East German medical academics in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The GDR leadership wanted medical academics to spearhead medical-research cooperation in the Third World and promote the East German pharmaceutical industry abroad, yet such cooperation was often inadequate due to a lack of expertise and political will, with the exception of a few cases such as the GDR's cooperation with Brazil. Trade in drugs with Third World countries was never substantial, yet it represented an important marker of prestige and foreign-currency earning. Borowy looks closely at a number of famous East German academics, such as Hans Knöll and Richard Kirsch, who were particularly involved in such missions – with mixed results. Perhaps the most surprising conclusion of Borowy's chapter is that the GDR's medical professionals actively encouraged and cajoled East German authorities to develop various forms of cooperation with the Global South. Borowy's chapter is an important reminder that going beyond an emphasis on diplomatic relations (or even beyond the State) enriches our understanding of twentieth-century international history and complicates the Cold War narrative.
While East German medical academics were generally eager mediators in exchanges between NSWP countries and Third World elites, Polish officials and teachers appear to have been more reluctant agents of socialist internationalism, as is evident from Przemysław Gasztold's survey of Polish policy in Africa. Gasztold argues that Warsaw was lukewarm towards developing an activist policy in Africa, which reflected Gomułka's autonomy in foreign policy and the fact that Poland's initiatives on the continent were mainly motivated by economic profit. Neither Polish officials in Warsaw nor teachers and academics working in Africa hid their scepticism about socialist transformation in Africa, and they often openly expressed unorthodox economic views. One striking example involved the case of Jan Drewnowski, a prominent Polish economist teaching at the University of Ghana, who was only sent home after President Kwame Nkrumah complained that his teaching exposed a preference for Western economic thought. While Poland's commitment to support national-liberation movements somewhat increased under Gomułka's successor, Edward Gierek, Polish support was mainly limited to the provision of scholarships for African students.
Part II highlights the fact that if we are to understand the policies of NSWP countries in the Third World, it is imperative to take into account the context of the Cold War, and the concerns of national governments and local elites, and to place them alongside the personal experiences, motivations and actions of individuals on the ground. Its four chapters each deal in some way with the agency of those men and women who tried to navigate a complex web of local politics, pressures from national governments and Cold War geopolitics. They were very much at the forefront of NSWP countries' policy in the Third World, acting as important intermediaries.
Part III Money and Influence: Diplomacy, Trade and Aid
Economic performance was a crucial component of competition between capitalism and socialism, between the ‘First’ and ‘Second’ worlds, during the Cold War. Swayed by evidence of rapid interwar industrialization in the USSR, many Third World leaders in the 1950s and 1960s were enthusiastic about Soviet-style industrialization based on economic planning. It was primarily economic competition that Khrushchev referred to when he challenged the West to a ‘peaceful competition’ between the two systems. The late 1950s was a period of high optimism for the Soviets, who believed that, with assistance from the Eastern bloc, Third World countries could successfully replicate the ‘Soviet model of development’, which implied collectivization of agriculture, nationalization of enterprises and high levels of investment in infrastructure and industrial development. Meanwhile, US economists – most famously Walt Rostow at MIT's Center for International Studies – offered their own models of development based on investments in agriculture and infrastructure. Economic development thus became a crucial weapon in the Cold War.35
Meanwhile, the economic relationship inside the Warsaw Pact was also under revision in the 1950s. If Stalin had sought to extract capital and resources from his satellites in order to achieve economic autarky, Khrushchev looked towards its more technologically advanced allies in Eastern and Central Europe as a source of expertise; advanced industrial practices; and, most crucially, as a source of access to Western technology in order to ‘catch up with and surpass’ the West in terms of living standards.36 Khrushchev wanted to revive the USSR-led Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) on the basis of specialization and supranational integration. In 1961, the Commission for Technical Assistance (CTA) was established in order to coordinate the provision of developmental assistance to the Third World based on the principle of economic specialization and the ‘division of labour’. This goal produced significant debates and many disagreements, and intra-bloc rivalry rather than cooperation in the Third World was commonplace. By the late 1960s, the Soviets and their allies in Eastern and Central Europe believed that they could no longer afford to export the ‘socialist model of development’ at any cost. The disillusionment with early Soviet development efforts in the Third World and the onset of European detente in the late 1960s led to a more pragmatic approach and an emphasis on East–West cooperation in developmental assistance.37
The trademark of the 1970s in Second–Third World economic exchanges was economic rationality. Khrushchev's successor, Leonid Brezhnev, wanted the Warsaw Pact to further Soviet foreign-policy interests yet also to improve economic growth and increase consumption and political stability. After 1967, the Soviet Union made clear that the NSWP countries could not rely solely on Moscow as the only supplier of strategic raw materials, and encouraged them to look to the Third World for alternatives. Such pressures increased in the 1970s. With NSWP countries increasingly reliant on the import of strategic raw materials from resource-rich countries of the Global South, mutual economic advantage became the catchphrase.38 At the same time, the 1970s saw the postwar breakdown of the international economic order when the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) showed its collective might as it hiked up the price of oil in the wake of the 1973 war between Israel and Egypt. The oil-rich yet conflict-ridden countries of the Middle East thus became major recipients of Soviet bloc arms exports. The Soviet Union benefited significantly, receiving around $19 billion in hard currency from arms sales, and earned around $23 billion on bilateral or soft-currency arms sales between 1974 and 1984.39 The NSWP also hoped that trade with Third World countries could rebalance their budgets, which increasingly relied on the import of consumer goods and technology from the West. However, trade with the Third World could not be rebalanced, as is evidenced by the $57 billion in debt that the Soviet bloc had accumulated by 1979.40
The authors in Part III explore the interplay of diplomacy, aid and trade in the foreign policies of the NSWP countries in the Third World. These chapters investigate how concerns over domestic economic performance and Soviet proposals for economic specialization of the Warsaw Pact countries factored in the policies of the NSWP countries in the Third World. They investigate how these states responded to those changes, as they tried to exploit new commercial-relations opportunities in the Third World at a time of growing indebtedness, transformation and crises in the Eastern bloc and the world economy.
Amongst the NSWP countries, Romania was the key critic of Soviet proposals for economic specialization within the Warsaw Pact framework. Research has focused on how the Romanian leadership managed to thwart these initiatives and turned to the Third World as a source of economic profit.41 Elena Dragomir adds to this growing body of scholarship in her chapter, which analyses Romania's strategy in the little-discussed episode of Bucharest blocking Mongolia's admission to the Warsaw Pact in July 1963. Unhappy about Soviet proposals on CMEA specialization, which would have relegated Romania to the role of raw-material provider within the Eastern bloc, Bucharest skillfully exploited Sino–Soviet disagreements as leverage in order to block Mongolia's membership.
Economic considerations are the focal point of Philip Muehlenbeck's chapter, which examines Czechoslovak policy in East Africa in the 1960s. A leading exporter of small arms to the Third World, Czechoslovakia had used military assistance in order to gain influence in the developing world. However, facing a stagnant economic situation by the mid-1960s, Prague became increasingly unwilling to provide military assistance as a gift, and instead sought customers for its arms. In Kenya and Uganda, Czechoslovakia established personal contacts with Oginga Odinga and Milton Obote respectively, and proceeded to sell arms and provide military training as both leaders wanted to reduce British influence in their countries. Czechoslovak involvement in Kenya was so extensive that Prague financed Odinga's ‘shadow government’. If Kenya eventually moved for closer cooperation with Britain, Uganda established a strong military relationship with Prague, with Czechoslovakia surpassing the UK and Israel as its main supplier of arms between 1964 and 1968. While the Soviet intervention of 1968 significantly curbed Czechoslovak influence in Africa, in the 1960s Prague not only acted without diktat from Moscow, but often drove communist policy on the continent.
Domestic economic concerns also occupy a central position in Csaba Békés's and Dániel Vékony's account of Hungarian policy in the Middle East. After 1956, the cornerstone of János Kádár's domestic policy was raising living standards for his subjects under a mixed economy commonly known as ‘goulash socialism’. Khrushchev's concept of ‘active foreign policy’ thus corresponded with Kádár's aims as it offered commercial opportunities, especially in the cash-rich Middle East. Since the Soviet arms industry owned a comparative advantage in the region, Hungary continuously pushed for specialization and eventually developed military industry and its own market share in the Middle East – an initiative that proved much more successful, while ordinary trade with the countries of the region did not fulfil the high hopes of the Hungarian leadership in the long run. Originally it was assumed that trade with the Middle East, including arms shipments, could considerably contribute to solving the problem of Hungary's constant balance-of-payments deficit vis-à-vis its non-Soviet bloc partners, but this goal never materialized. By the late 1980s, Hungary gave up on the ‘promised lands’ of the Middle East and re-established full diplomatic relations with Israel.
While Dragomir, Muehlenbeck, Békés and Vékony all in various ways emphasize the key role of domestic economic considerations in analysing motivations for NSWP engagement with the Third World, in his survey of Bulgaria's relations with the Third World Jordan Baev underlines the primacy of political considerations. The central reason Bulgaria provided assistance to a mind-boggling number of actors in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America was primarily driven by political concerns, as Todor Zhivkov was eager to back up Soviet ambitions in the region. Baev argues that the benefits of commercial exchange with Third World countries were relatively small, but Bulgaria managed to leverage its loyalty in order to obtain economic benefits from the Soviet Union. The Bulgarian leadership thus pursued an active foreign policy in the Third World in order to increase the country's prestige within the Warsaw Pact in the name of class solidarity.
This volume contributes to key debates about the agency of the NSWP countries in the Soviet bloc and the Cold War, and the place of Eastern and Central Europe in postwar developments. Firstly, the volume reinstates the concept that the engagement of NSWP countries with a variety of actors in Africa, Asia and Latin America was not driven by Soviet concerns and directives, contributing to the ‘decentralization’ of the Cold War narrative. Recent studies have contributed to our understanding as to how de-Stalinization reshaped relations between the states of socialist Eastern and Central Europe, the Soviet Union and the West. The investigation of NSWP policies in the Third World adds a missing dimension to this body of work that investigates 1956 as the crucial moment in the emancipation of state-socialist Eastern and Central Europe in the postwar period. Secondly, the volume re-emphasizes the roles of elites in international politics. While it deals mainly with intra-state relations, an emphasis on specific individuals and groups – such as diplomats, teachers or medical professionals – brings international historians into conversation with scholars of transnationalism who look beyond the State in order to investigate expert groups, NGOs and transnational ‘epistemic communities’ that often transcended Cold War divides.42 The Warsaw Pact in the Third World thus makes a significant contribution towards the emerging scholarship of both alliance politics and the Cold War in the Global South. The volume draws on a rich body of archival material from Eastern and Central Europe that either has been recently declassified or has been largely ignored in the English-language literature, often for linguistic reasons. It also draws on the regional expertise of its contributors, providing a view on international politics from a regional perspective.
Notes
1.‘The Middle East: The Trojan Horse’, Time, 7 November 1955.
2.Philip E. Muehlenbeck, Czechoslovakia in Africa, 1945–1968 (New York, 2016), pp. 91–5.
3.On official US reaction to the deal, see Impact of the Egyptian–Czechoslovak Arms Deal, August 27–November 16, 1955 (Documents 226–415), Foreign Relations of the United States, 1955–1957, Arab-Israeli Dispute, 1955, Volume XIV (Washington, DC, 1985).
4.On Nasser's reasons for the deal, see Guy Laron, ‘Cutting the Gordian Knot: The Post-WWII Egyptian Quest for Arms and the 1955 Czechoslovak Arms Deal’, Cold War International History Project, Working Paper No. 55 (2007).
5.The term ‘cardboard castle’ belongs to a NATO official. See Vojtech Mastny and Malcolm Byrne (eds), A Cardboard Castle?: An inside History of the Warsaw Pact, 1955–1991 (Budapest, 2005).
6.This list does not include Albania for three reasons. First, as the smallest and poorest member of the Warsaw Pact, it was the least involved politically and economically with the Third World. Secondly, Albania ceased to be an active member of the Warsaw Pact by the early 1960s and formally withdrew from the alliance in 1968. Finally, and most importantly, we were unable to find a contributor who uses Albanian archival material to study Tirana's relations with the developing world. For an exceptional new study, see: Elidor Mëhilli, From Stalin to Mao: Albania and the Socialist World (Ithaca, 2017).
7.On evolution of the term, see: B. R. Tomlinson, ‘What was the Third World?’ Journal of Contemporary History, 38 (2) (April 2003), pp. 307–21.
8.Zbigniew K. Brzezinski in The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict (Cambridge, MA, 1967).
9.Andrzej Korbonski, ‘Eastern Europe and the Third World; or, “Limited Regret Strategy” Revisited’, in Andrzej Korbonski and Francis Fukuyama (eds), The Soviet Union and the Third World: The Last Three Decades (Ithaca, NY, 1987).
10.Prominent examples of this genre include Roger E. Kanet (ed.), The Soviet Union and the Developing Nations (Baltimore, MD, 1974); Roger Kanet (ed.), The Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and the Third World (New York, 1987); Michael Radu (ed.), Eastern Europe and the Third World: East vs. South (New York, 1981); Korbonski and Fukuyama, The Last Three Decades; and Alvin Z. Rubinstein, Moscow's Third World Strategy (Princeton, NJ, 1988).
11.Kanet, The Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and the Third World.
12.Tony Smith ‘New Bottles for New Wine: A Pericentric Framework for the Study of the Cold War’, Diplomatic History 24 (4) (2000), p. 568.
13.Hope M. Harrison, Driving the Soviets up the Wall: Soviet-East German Relations, 1953–1961 (Princeton, NJ, 2003).
14.Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (New York, 2013).
15.Some of the most recent examples of this approach are Tanya Harmer, Allende's Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (Chapel Hill, NC, 2011); Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, Hanoi's War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam (Chapel Hill, NC, 2012); Piero Gleijeses, Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976–1991 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2013); and Jeremy Friedman, Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World (Chapel Hill, NC, 2015). For a historiographical discussion, see David C. Engerman, ‘The Second World's Third World’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 12 (1) (Winter 2011).
16.For an overview of the field, see Ana Antic, Johanna Conterio and Dora Vargha (eds), ‘Agents of Internationalism’, a special issue of Contemporary European History, 25, 2 (2016).
17.Some recent studies include James G. Hershberg, ‘Peace Probes and the Bombing Pause: Hungarian and Polish Diplomacy during the Vietnam War, December 1965–January 1966’, Journal of Cold War Studies, 5 (2) (Spring 2003), pp. 32–67; Zoltán Szoke, ‘Delusion or Reality? Secret Hungarian Diplomacy during the Vietnam War’, Journal of Cold War Studies 12 (4) (2010), pp. 119–80; Margaret K. Gnoinska, ‘Poland and the Cold War in East and Southeast Asia, 1949–1965’, PhD dissertation, George Washington University, Washington, DC, 2010; and Muehlenbeck, Czechoslovakia in Africa.
18.Some examples include William Glenn Gray, Germany's Cold War: The Global Campaign to Isolate East Germany, 1949–1969 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2003); Gareth Winrow, The Foreign Policy of the GDR in Africa (Cambridge, 2009); Klaus Storkmann, Geheime Solidarität: Militärbeziehungen und Militärhilfen der DDR in die ‘Dritte Welt’ [Secret Solidarity: GDR Military Relations and Military Aid to the ‘Third World’] (Berlin, 2012); Young-sun Hong, Cold War Germany, the Third World, and the Global Humanitarian Regime (New York, 2015); Jeffrey Herf, Undeclared Wars Against Israel: East Germany and the West German Far Left 1967–1989 (New York, 2016); Massimiliano Trentin, ‘“Tough negotiations”. The two Germanys in Syria and Iraq, 1963–74’, Cold War History 8 (3) (2008), pp. 353–80.
19.See, for example, Laurien Crump, The Warsaw Pact Reconsidered: International Relations in Eastern Europe, 1955–1969 (New York, 2015).
20.Oscar Sanchez-Sibony, Red Globalization: The Political Economy of the Soviet Cold War from Stalin to Khrushchev (New York, 2014).
21.James G. Hershberg, ‘The Crisis Years, 1958–1963’, in Odd Arne Westad (ed.), Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretations, Theory (London, 2000), p. 304.
22.On reflections about 1975 as a period of optimism for Soviet policy in the Third World, see Nikolai Leonov, Likholetie [Time of Troubles] (Moscow, 1997), pp. 135–45.
23.Georgiy Mirskiy, ‘Na znamenatel'nom Rubezhe’ [At the Threshold], Vostok, 6 (1996), p. 131.
24.See Sergey Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev: Creation of a Superpower (University Park, PA, 2000), p. 436.
25.Quoted in Alexander Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, Khrushchev's Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary (New York, 2006), p. 57.
26.Westad, The Global Cold War, pp. 39–67.
27.For discussion of ‘active foreign policy’ doctrine, see Csaba Békés: ‘The Warsaw Pact and the Helsinki process, 1965–1970’, in Wilfried Loth and Georges-Henri Soutou (eds) The Making of Détente: Eastern and Western Europe in the Cold War, 1965–75 (London and New York, 2007), p. 201.
28.On Hungary, see Csaba Békés, ‘Hungarian Foreign Policy in the Bipolar World, 1945–1991’, Foreign Policy Review 3 (2004), p. 78. On the GDR's discussions, see Lorena da Vita's chapter in this volume. On Czechoslovakia, see ‘Party meeting with chiefs of foreign missions’, 1958, National Archives of the Czech Republic, Records of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia [hereafter NA-UV KSC], Inv. 4, Ka. 8.
29.Csaba Bekes, ‘East Central Europe, 1953–1956’, in Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, The Cambridge History of the Cold War (Cambridge, 2012) pp. 334–52.
30.Some of these forums included meetings between respective deputy foreign ministers, representatives of the International Departments, press agencies, solidarity committees and other ‘public organizations’, cultural bodies and academic institutes. On coordination, see Csaba Békés, ‘Cold War, Détente and the Soviet Bloc’, pp. 247–59; James Hershberg, Sergey Radchenko, Péter Vámos and David Wolff. ‘The Interkit Story: A Window into the Final Decades of the Sino-Soviet Relationship’, The Cold War International History Project Working Paper Series (February 2011).
31.On the Bandung Conference and its consequences, see Westad, The Global Cold War, pp. 100–9.
32.For a further discussion of this period, see James G. Hershberg, ‘The Crisis Years, 1958–1963,’ pp. 303–26.
33.On cultural exchange between the Second and Third Worlds, and especially on its effect on the public, see Tobias Rupprecht, Soviet Internationalism after Stalin: Interaction and Exchange between the USSR and Latin America during the Cold War (Cambridge, 2015); James Mark and Péter Apor, ‘Socialism Goes Global: Decolonization and the Making of a New Culture of Internationalism in Socialist Hungary, 1956–1989’, Journal of Modern History 87 (December 2015), pp. 852–89.
34.For discussion, see Vladislav Zubok, Zhivago's Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 88–121.
35.David Engerman, ‘The Romance of Economic Development and New Histories of the Cold War’, Diplomatic History 28 (1) (January 2004), pp. 23–54. On the ‘Soviet Model of Development’ and its application in West Africa, see Alessandro Iandolo, ‘The Rise and Fall of the “Soviet Model of Development” in West Africa, 1957–64’, Cold War History 12 (4) (November 2012).
36.Austin Jersild, ‘The Soviet State as Imperial Scavenger: “Catch Up and Surpass” in the Transnational Socialist Bloc, 1950–1960’, American Historical Review 116 (1) (February 2011), pp. 109–32.
37.Sara Lorenzini, ‘Comecon and the South in the Years of Détente: A Study on East-South Economic Relations’, European Review of History: Revue Européenne d'Histoire 21 (2) (2014), pp. 186–8.
38.Ibid., p. 188.
39.David Painter, ‘Oil and geopolitics: the oil crises of the 1970s and the Cold War’, Historical Social Research 39 (4) (2014), pp. 186–208.
40.Engerman, ‘Romance of Economic Development’, p. 49.
41.On the link between Romania's economy and its foreign policy see, among others, Elena Dragomir, ‘Romania's Participation in the Agricultural Conference in Moscow, 2–3 February 1960’, Cold War History 13, no. 3 (2013), pp. 331–51; Mioara Anton Romanian and Iesirea Din Cerc, Politica Externa a Regimului Gheorghiu-Dej (Bucharest, 2007); Dan Cătănuş, Tot mai departe de Moscova: Politica externă a României 1956–1965 [Further from Moscow. Romania's foreign policy, 1956–1964] (Bucharest, 2011); Liviu Taranu, Romania in Consiliul de Ajutor Economic Reciproc, 1949–1965 [Romania in the Council of Help and Mutual Assistance] (Bucharest, 2007); Corina Mavrodin, ‘A Maverick in the Making: Romania's de-Satellization process and the Global Cold War, 1953–1963’, PhD dissertation, London School of Economics and Political Science, 2017.
42.Erez Manela, ‘A Pox on Your Narrative: Writing Disease Control into Cold War History’, Diplomatic History 34 (2) (2010), pp. 299–323; Dora Vargha, ‘Between east and west: Polio Vaccination Across the Iron Curtain in Cold War Hungary’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 88 2 (2014), pp. 319–43.