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In 1986, Sue Dobson, a young white woman from Pretoria, was appointed by the African National Congress (AnC) to be a spy in the regime of the South African apartheid.
As part of her mission, she was detached in Moscow to train specialists.
“It was a very intensive training course,” said Dobson, who is now retired and lives in England. “(This) has covered how to take observation, things like secret writing, photography, strategies for being out and around.
She didn't have much free time, but she managed to spend a few days in Leningrad, now named St. Petersburg.
“It must have been winter 1986 and everything is covered with snowy,” she remembered. “It was absolutely beautiful.”
When she returned to South Africa next year, she was hired as a reporter to the Information Bureau, the propaganda wing of the Apartheid regime. Her work gave her access to ministers and other high profile information. But in 1989, authorities discovered her family's ties with Ant and her cover were inflated.
“I was told to stay where I was and that I would be accompanied by Praetoria on an airplane with one of the foreign affairs, which was a euphemism at the intelligence department, and I decided that I would not hang around,” said Dobson, whose memoir is entitled: spying South Africa never got caught.
“The game was up and I ran away at night … I had to make my way to Botswana, and Soviet diplomats helped me there and put me on a plane in the UK.”
Dobson said he did not know enough about the “nuances and intricacies of the situation” to comment on the current full -scale invasion of Russia in Ukraine.
While the Western powers have largely condemned the onset of modern Russia to their neighbor, the sympathy for the Kremlin came from perhaps an unexpected neighborhood: Africa.
Only half of African governments condemned Russia in the United Nations organization in 2022, the year Russian President Vladimir Putin began the war.
Experts say this trend lies in the historical championship in Moscow of anti -immimmerist causes.
The retreat of Russia against Western influence in Africa dates back to the 19th century. While other European powers looted and separated The continent during the struggle for Africa, the Russian Empire took the country of its fellow Orthodox Christians in Ethiopia in 1895-96. The Ital-Ethiopian War, providing weapons and other support.
According to Alexander Polianichev, however, a Ukrainian historian of the Russian Empire, Russian participation is greatly exaggerated.
“Much of this story returns to Nikolai Leontiev, a Russian adventurer who arrived in Ethiopia in early 1895 and bluffs his path in the inner circle of (Ethiopian emperor) Menelik II,” Poliyaniche told Al Jazeera.
“In his story about the Ethiopian resistance against Italy, Leontiev extensively described the decisive role, which he claims to have played on the battlefield, posing as one of the architects of victory in the battle at Adva.
Leontiev is often credited for the delivery of a shipment of weapons and ammunition that helped Ethiopia repel the Italian colonists.
“While the Russian government really sent these weapons at the request of Leontiev – the old rifles in Berdan no longer need the Russian army, which was receiving the new Mosin rifles – they never reached Ethiopia on time,” Polianicheche added. “The Spas who transported them was detained by the Italians and the shipment did not arrive in Ethiopia until the war was over.”
Although Russia's naval capabilities mean that the colonization of Africa for itself has never been a realistic perspective that has not stopped Nikolay Ashinov, leader of a group of Cossacks, from landing on the shores of Djibouti in 1889 and its declaration of Russian land. However, the French had already established a colony and quickly degreased Ashinov's settlement, bombing it with warships.
Later, during the Cold War, the Soviets assisted Friendly governments in Angola, Mozambique and Congo in conflicts against factions supported by Western powers, though not always successfully.
The USSR was also an ally of Egypt with General Gamal Abdel Nasser, offering weapons and infrastructure deals.
“The Soviet Union had ideological and practical motives for supporting anti-colonial movements and decolonization of the global south,” explained Kimberly St. Julian-Varna, an American historian of the USSR.
“On the one hand, this is struggling with the United States and Western Europe to show that socialism offers the best form of society and the government.
“On the other hand, the Soviet Union took advantage of commercial agreements that strengthened its exports to goods to the allied countries and gave the USSR a number of natural resources from the global South that it brings well below market prices.
As part of its work with African countries, the University of Patrice Lumumba, named after the Congoan leader, was opened in Moscow, where around 500 scholarships have been provided annually to African students since the 1960s.
But some say they have experienced racism. In 1963, Edmund Assare-ADDO, a Ghanai student, was beaten to death because of an alleged interracial relations, which caused a rare protest against Red Square.
“It was a strong contradiction with Soviet propaganda in their countries, which encouraged the country as the antithesis of European colonial powers,” says St. Julian-Varnon.
“Sometimes racism reports in the Soviet Union reach the Western media and undermine Soviet attacks on American anti-red racism.
While Apartheid's propaganda represented the USSR as the desire of South Africa resources, the Soviets supported the ANC, and its armed wing, Umchonto Wesis (MK), from the 1960s, operatives and training operators such as Sue Dobson.
“I certainly think that ANC would not forget the role that the Soviet Union plays to enable Ant to come to power,” Dobson said.
“I think this is something that is quite respected and revered.
Currently, Anta is the ruling party of South Africa, and although he maintains a neutral position, the government avoids condemning Russia directly, perhaps reflecting prolonged sympathy, since many senior members of the ANC have trained or studied in the USSR, for which Russia is regarded as an heir.
“The call of Russia's anti -colonial story”
More explicit pro-Russian maintenance is visible at the level of the low level.
In February, a small rally of the South African Ukrainians in Durgan was interrupted by counter -protesters of Russian flags and played the song of Meme Sigma Boy, a viral pop hit written by a Russian composer.
Russian flags are not an unfamiliar view elsewhere on the continent.
Moscow has forgiven the debts of several African countries and has provided boots on the spot to deal with security concerns in countries such as Mali and the Central African Republic, where local leaders welcomed support, despite the accusations of atrocities by Russian mercenaries.
“The call of Russia's” anti -colonial “story lies in its usefulness for societies and ruling elites in Eurasia and beyond, which are ready to accept or even accept it, as long as it is aligned with its own political sensitivity,” said the historian Polianichev.
“It is not taken for granted, because in the past Russia was really” anti -imperialist “, but because it actively opposes the West in the present.
