Telepneva, Natalia
(2014)
Our sacred duty: the Soviet Union, the liberation movements in the Portuguese colonies, and the Cold War, 1961-1975.
PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.
Abstract
In 1961, a series of uprisings exploded in Angola, Portugal’s largest colony in
Africa. A struggle for the independence of all the Portuguese colonies in Africa
followed, organized by the national liberation movements: the MPLA, FNLA, and
UNITA in Angola, FRELIMO in Mozambique, and the PAIGC in Guinea-Bissau. The
wars would end in 1974, following a military coup d'état in Lisbon and the
dissolution of the Portuguese dictatorship during the Carnation Revolution. This
thesis explores fourteen years of anti-colonial campaigns: the people who led the
liberation movements in the Portuguese colonies, the cadres these leaders
encountered in Moscow, East Berlin, Prague, Sofia, and Warsaw, and the
international environment they faced. It begins by looking at contacts forged
between Soviet cadres and African nationalist leaders from Portuguese colonies in
the late 1950s, before offering detailed analysis of why the Soviet Union and
Czechoslovakia offered assistance to the MPLA and the PAIGC in 1961, the same year
Angola erupted into spasms of racial violence and the Soviet Union and the United
States locked horns over the status of West Berlin. The subsequent chapters analyze
the evolution of Soviet relations with the liberation movements during the 1960s
and 1970s, the role this relationship played in shaping Soviet attitudes and policy in
Africa, and the significance of Soviet bloc assistance in anti-colonial campaigns. This
thesis also looks at the diplomacy of the liberation movements and their ideological
and organizational transformations over fourteen years of guerrilla war. The final
chapter evaluates the Soviet role in the decolonization of Portuguese Africa
following the fall of the Portuguese dictatorship and investigates why the Soviets
decided to intervene on behalf of the MPLA in the pivotal event of this thesis – the
beginning of the civil war in Angola in 1975.
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