1920s to 1990s · Africanspan
Britain sells its African empire as a wall against Moscow
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Lenin treated empire as the highest stage of capitalism and its weakest link, and through the Comintern in the 1920s the young Soviet Union encouraged revolutionary movements outside Europe, with more attention to Asia than to Africa. Under Stalin the policy turned inward and Africa was left alone until his death in 1953. From the middle of the 1950s Khrushchev and then Brezhnev supplied money and weapons to movements on the left. In its first phase the Cold War argued for keeping African empires rather than winding them up. Britain presented its colonies as a barrier to communism and its renewed colonial investment as a Marshall Plan against the poverty the Soviets were expected to exploit. African leaders read the situation quickly. Nkrumah kept Ghana in the Commonwealth while cultivating Moscow. Guinea survived French economic punishment because Moscow paid. Nasser and Ben Bella took Soviet patronage. Governments that chose Washington, Mobutu in Zaire and Kenyatta in Kenya, received military bases in exchange for silence about how they governed at home.
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