The Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and Africa in the Cold War: The Educational Ties

This working paper is intended as an overview of the Soviet Union’s and Eastern Europe’s aid to and cooperation with Africa in the field of higher and professional-technical education during the Cold War. For a long time, both this and other important chapters of the Eastern bloc’s relations with Africa and more broadly with the Third World had been either neglected or completely dismissed. In post-Cold War scholarship, the prevalent notion was that the Soviet-style political and economic model “was responsible for many grievous economic ills in the Third World in the second half of the twentieth century” and that it “shattered all possibilities of democratic rule, prosperity, and social stability”. The overall contribution of the Eastern bloc in the development of the Third World was considered as either negative or insignificant. Even a radical political economist like Andre Gunder Frank could affirm in 1989 that “much Third Worldist socialist rhetoric is just that, and no more”, and add that “the East has supported superstructural change in the South with words and sometimes arms”