At the end of July, Russia will hold a summit with African countries in St. Petersburg for the second time. The event is a showcase of Russia’s significant influence on the African continent, which in recent years has been marked by the presence of the Wagner militia and Russian intelligence in elections. Those ties did not form under Vladimir Putin, but the Russian president is drawing on a history dating back to the Soviet Union.
(RFI) Putin’s advance in recent years on the African continent is not a casual strategy. In his desire to expand Russia’s areas of influence, the Russian president has found Africa to be an ideal location, given the rich history of relations the Soviet Union established with the continent during the long years of the Cold War.
The summer of 1960 was a tumultuous one in the future Democratic Republic of Congo. The country gained independence from Belgium in June, the first democratically elected government was installed, and in September, power struggles led to the country’s first coup d’état by Joseph-Désiré Mobutu and, a few months later, the assassination of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. A rapid succession of events that would leave its mark on that year of struggle for emancipation.
At that time, some 11,000 kilometers from Kinshasa in Russia, the Kremlin’s foreign policy took a new turn in the light of the crisis in the Belgian Congo. Alexandre Chélépine, then head of the KGB, realized that he had virtually no spies south of the Sahara desert. Secret agents had a strong presence in Egypt, some in the Maghreb and good friendships with the Communist Party in South Africa.
A group of spies to save Lumumba
This network, however, was insufficient for the Soviet spy chief. All the more so because Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev saw opening up to Third World countries, especially in Africa, as a priority to mark his break with Joseph Stalin. The “Father of Peoples” had shown little concern for his “children” on the African continent.
Thus the Congo crisis became “the first proven case of KGB intervention in the affairs of a sub-Saharan African country”, notes Natalia Telepneva, an expert on the history of Soviet intelligence services in Africa at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow.
This interference marked the beginning of the expansion of Russian influence across the African continent.
“And despite a lack of interest in the region between the early 1990s and the late 2000s, the Kremlin left its mark. To bring Russia back to Africa, Vladimir Putin was able to take advantage of the USSR’s relatively good image on the continent and a network of old contacts,” explains Marcel Plichta, an expert on Russian influence in Africa at the University of St Andrews.
The operation to rescue Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, who seemed to be the ideal partner for the USSR, was under-resourced at the time. “Moscow was only able to send a few agents to the scene,” explains Natalia Telepneva. Thus, the coup d’état by Joseph-Désiré Mobutu in 1960, actively supported by the American CIA, was a painful failure for the KGB.
Low-cost Cold War in Africa
Lagging behind the Americans, the Soviets needed to advance their strategies of influence in the territory. For that, they could count on the enthusiasm of agents in a new endeavor.
“For the first agents who joined the KGB’s African division, the continent offered interesting prospects for espionage, and the goals they sought – to support liberation movements while dissecting US activity on the ground – seemed noble,” writes Natalia Telepneva in her book Cold War Liberation (ed. The University of North Carolina Press, 2022), based on the memoirs of Vadim Kirpitchenko, who was the first director of the KGB’s African section.
From 1960, Russia opened more and more embassies in African countries. Each of its delegations “included one KGB agent and another from the GRU [military intelligence]”, explains Natalia Telepneva.
The crisis in Congo served as a lesson. “Moscow realized that the USSR did not have the same resources as the Western powers present in Africa. Intelligence and clandestine operations seemed to be the best way to wage a ‘low-cost’ Cold War [the investment being essentially human],” summarizes Natalia Telepneva.
Nevertheless, the Russian failure in Congo had a beneficial effect for Moscow. Russia emerged as an ally of a man who would become a myth for liberation movements on the continent, Patrice Lumumba.
The Americans, on the other hand, were seen as partners of the colonial countries. This image of a Soviet Union on the “right side” of history in Africa was reinforced by its support – sometimes exaggerated by Russian propaganda – for Nelson Mandela’s ANC against the racist Apartheid regime.
Russian spies did their utmost to cultivate this impression. This was the beginning of a major campaign, including what is now called disinformation operations, to portray the USSR as a disinterested supporter of a decolonized Africa, while Washington would be portrayed as the country conspiring to protect its interests.
The KGB deployed its full arsenal, manipulating the local media and fabricating false documents to make the CIA the enemy to be destroyed. Moscow fed the paranoia of Kwame Nkrumah, the first leader of independent Ghana, who saw himself as the “African Lenin”. He ended up seeing American spies everywhere and even wrote a letter directly to US President Lyndon Johnson, accusing the CIA of mobilizing all its resources for the sole purpose of overthrowing him.
From Soviet dream to disappointment
It is hard not to see in this campaign the precursor of the online disinformation activities of the “troll factories” run by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner mercenary group.
In Africa, Putin’s Russia is using a version 2.0 of the Soviet narrative: at the time, the USSR presented itself as the champion of decolonization, while today “Russia claims to be the ally of pan-Africanism against the former colonial powers”, explains Marcel Plichta. The Russian campaign to fuel anti-French sentiment in the Central African Republic (and Mali) is just one example.
But the KGB’s efforts, which have so inspired today’s Russia, have not always been successful. At least not as much as Moscow had hoped. The USSR “thought that these countries would naturally align themselves with communist ideology and therefore with the Soviet bloc. But this turned out to be more complicated than expected,” says Natalia Telepneva.
The USSR’s first “friendly” leader in sub-Saharan Africa, Kwame Nkrumah, who was in charge of Ghana for six years, was overthrown in 1966 after his authoritarian tendencies. The other two countries that allied more openly with Moscow – Modibo Keïta’s Mali and Ahmed Sékou Touré’s Guinea – are not remembered as good communist experiments. Keïta was ousted from power in Mali in 1968 after eight years, while Touré maintained an authoritarian and brutal regime in Guinea for more than 25 years, until 1984.
It was only with the second wave of decolonization and the dissolution of the former Portuguese empire in Africa – Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau and Angola – in the 1970s that Soviet-influenced operations resumed. This time, however, leader Leonid Brezhnev encouraged the intelligence services “to redirect their efforts towards strengthening military and security cooperation with the armies of ‘friendly’ countries”, says Natalia Telepneva.
The USSR and soft power
The USSR became one of the largest suppliers of arms to African countries. In the winter of 1977, for example, Ethiopia, supported by the USSR against Somalia, watched “a Soviet plane full of military equipment and instructors land every 20 minutes”, according to the Mitrokhine archives, a collection of KGB documents.
This approach is reminiscent of current partnerships and Vladimir Putin and the Wagner group on the African continent. As Marcel Plichta points out, “Moscow’s main strategy to extend its influence in Africa, besides sending Wagner’s mercenaries, is to increase the number of military cooperation agreements [21 signed between 2014 and 2019]”.
During the Cold War, military support was not limited to arms supplies. The USSR also trained thousands of “freedom fighters” on its territory. The Teaching Center-165 in Perevalnoe in Crimea, now a Ukrainian peninsula annexed by Russia, became the most famous example.
Weapons handling was one of the subjects taught, but there was much more: “There was also political training, with excursions to tourist sites, visits to collective farms and film screenings. The courses also included an introduction to Leninism-Marxism and discussions on the history of colonization,” explains Natalia Telepneva.
Moscow realized very early on the role of education in deepening its ties with Africa. This was the aim of Patrice Lumumba University, which was opened in Moscow by Khrushchev in 1961. Over 50 years, it has trained more than 7,000 students from 48 African countries in diverse fields such as physics, economics and public administration. And other African students were also admitted to various institutions in the USSR.
For Russian spies, the group of African university students was fertile ground for potential recruits. In fact, the vice-director of Lumumba University belonged to the KGB.
But “that was not the most important thing for Moscow”, says Konstantinos Katsakioris, an expert on education in Africa and the former USSR at the University of Bayreuth. What mattered was improving the image of the USSR among Africans. All these students were supposed to talk about Soviet wonders when they returned home.
And that is still a trump card for Vladimir Putin today. After the collapse of the USSR, Moscow, too busy with its internal problems, gradually left Africa. But all the alumni trained in the former USSR remained.
When, in 2014, Vladimir Putin decided to return to the African continent in search of new allies to compensate for the diplomatic isolation caused by his annexation of Crimea, he knew his agents could find friends there.
“The military and students were young when they went to the USSR. Today, some of them have become influential members in their home countries,” says Plichta. There are thousands of ears potentially receptive to the sweet promises of Putin’s and Prigojiine’s men.