Learning from Experience: Moscow’s Changing Approaches to ‘Third World’ Revolution

Starting in the 1950s, the Soviet Union, the United States, and China began to compete for the allegiance of the (emerging) post-colonial world. But which newly independent countries were ready for socialism? What paths should aspiring socialist leaders follow? How much room did they need to make for religion, nationalism, or even the market? And how did the USSR go about figuring out whom to support, what to advise, and when to cut its losses? The latter question occupied observers of the USSR during the Cold War era, and, over the last twenty years, many historians who have produced case studies and a few larger, synthetic works.

Jeremy Friedman’s Ripe for Revolution: Building Socialism in the Third World, is an important and highly original entry into this discussion. Using well-chosen “episodes of a larger engagement between socialist powers and developing states,” Friedman analyzes the experiences of five revolutionary movements that were supported by Moscow, Beijing, or both (13). Chapter 1 traces the USSR’s support for Indonesia and its involvement with that country’s Communist Party (KPI). Indonesia was one of Nikita Khrushchev’s first targets when he decided to revive the Soviet commitment to anti-colonialism. Moscow’s relationship with Indonesian President Sukarno led it to support his elimination of a parliamentary system in favor of “Guided Democracy.” As Friedman shows, the Soviet involvement with Indonesia also forced Soviet scholars and policymakers to think more seriously about the role of religion (Islam proved to be a powerful mobilizing force not just among the bourgeoisie but also the peasantry and working class), and how to guide a popular communist party which was nevertheless locked out of power, and which refused to follow the Soviet line. Friedman sees the ties between the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and socialist parties in decolonizing countries as neither a patron-client relationship nor an alliance between equals but a “franchise system, in which the local communist leaders were basically licensed to operate the local franchise of the international communist movement, while headquarters in Moscow looked after the interests of the brand as a whole” (74).

The next two chapters focus on cases where Soviet involvement was limited: Chile under Salvador Allende and Tanzania under Julius Nyerere. Friedman shows how despite their restricted involvement, both the Soviets and the Chinese studied these experiments and incorporated lessons learned into their policymaking and advice in other cases where involvement was more substantial. In the case of Chile, the Soviets, having learned the lessons of the Indonesian debacle, saw Allende’s experiment as evidence of the possibility of a peaceful transition. At the same time, they did not see Allende or his party as particularly reliable, and limited economic aid. The fractiousness of his coalition, and the ease with which he was overthrown, ultimately convinced the Soviets that bourgeois democracy was indeed a “cover for imperialist machinations” (123). Moreover, the economic crisis set off by Allende’s enthusiasm for seizing industries and investing in state-controlled industry taught the Soviets to advise focusing on production and gaining popular support. Chapter 3 turns to the case of Tanzania and Julius Nyerere’s attempt to build an African socialism (Ujamaa). The Soviets eyed this effort warily at first but became more hopeful after the Arusha Declaration in 1967 with its insistence on state control of production and a ruling party of workers and peasants (140). Yet as Nyerere insisted, he had no intention of letting Tanzania become a colony of yet another power, including China and the Soviet Union. This limited how much aid he would receive and how much advice he was willing to take.

The disappointing result of Tanzanian collectivization (which the Soviets had warned against) would inform the Soviet approach to Angola (the subject of chapter 4), where several socialist organizations vied for power during and after the campaign for independence. Here the Soviets had to figure out how to deal with the problem of race. Many of the leftist Angolan revolutionaries were white or mixed-race, a potential liability. At first, the Soviets resisted any suggestion that the revolutionary leadership should consist primarily of black Angolans, since such a reading implied that race could be more important than class; later, Soviet officials came to embrace the importance of black leadership in the movement. They also came to support the regime’s turn to foreign investment and focus on economic growth. The final chapter covers the Soviet response to the Iranian revolution. Scholars have long been puzzled by the USSR’s support for the theocratic regime instituted by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, even as it became blatantly obvious that the regime was not only uninterested in working with the USSR, but also intent on crushing the Iranian left. Friedman artfully traces Soviet thinking on Iran alongside the different responses to the modernization campaign and growing authoritarianism of the Shah. Friedman shows how the USSR’s “project of finding a road to socialist revolution in the developing world, and the practical and theoretical compromises that entailed, made possible the very conception of something like a modernizing, anti-imperialist theocracy” (261).

The last observation illustrates one of the most impressive aspects of this book. Friedman is just as interested in how the revolutionary movements he studies learned, argued, and resolved their contradictions, as he is in how Beijing and Moscow changed their approach to the socialist revolution. Ripe for Revolution is based on prodigious research in twenty-four archives across a dozen countries, as well as careful reading of theoretical journals, the press, and assorted materials produced by these movements. For those cases where access was limited, Friedman also finds useful work-arounds to gain insights into developments within the movements; the use of various east-bloc archives (for instance, using East German sources to understand internal Tudeh deliberations) proves very fruitful. All of this original research is skillfully integrated with the author’s deep reading on the individual case studies.

This is a book that matters, and not only because, as Friedman points out in the conclusion, the Marxist-Leninist party has outlived the supposed end of state socialism. More importantly, it enriches our understanding of the relationship between ideological commitment and the practical business of building a socialist society. Friedman is fully convincing in his argument that the various twists and turns in Moscow, Beijing, and within the various revolutionary movements—including the interest in markets which became increasingly pronounced in the late 1970s and 1980s—should not be seen as an abandonment of ideological commitment, but rather as a series of experiments in how to achieve the goal of world socialist revolution (7). Rather than seeing deviations from the USSR’s own model of state-socialism as part of a continuous decline, the book shows us that socialism was always a capacious project.

I have two minor criticisms. The first is that aside from a brief overview of some of the key Soviet players in the introduction, the book never offers a map for how learning happened at an institutional level or how lessons learned were integrated into policymaking. Did the International Department of the CPSU Central Committee have the exclusive mandate when it came to deciding which experiments were worth pursuing? What was the relative role of the KGB, the military, or academic specialists? The second is that the discussion of economics is generally quite limited—the book never gets into the details of why Ujamaa did not work as planned, for example, or the problems of establishing a welfare state in Iran. As a result, it is ultimately not clear how well the Soviets read these experiments, and whether they really studied them in depth as they changed their approach to world revolution. Of course, satisfying either of these claims would have meant sacrificing some of the breadth and comparison that makes this such an important and satisfying book.

Author Biography

Artemy Kalinovsky is professor of Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet Studies at Temple University, in Philadelphia, PA, United States. His first book was A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Cambridge, MA, 2011). His second book, Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan (Ithaca, NY, 2018), won the Davis and Hewett prizes from the Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. He is currently working on a project that studies the legacies of socialist development in contemporary Central Asia to examine entanglements between socialist and capitalist development approaches in the late twentieth century.