© 2008 The Author Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd History Compass 6/2 (2008): 389–403, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00508.x South Africa’s Soviet Connection 1 Irina Filatova* University of KwaZulu-Natal Abstract To outward appearance at least, South Africa and the Soviet Union did not enjoy close relations during most of the 20th century. Diplomatic relations existed on paper between the Boer republics and Russia during the Anglo-Boer war but they ended when the republics lost their independence. During the 1920s and 1930s trade was negligible, and the new high point in mutual interest and relations came only during the Second World War, when Soviet diplomatic or trade missions opened in Johannesburg, Pretoria and Cape Town. This official relationship was broken by the National Party government in 1956, and was re-established only in the early 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of apartheid. Diplomatic relations were, however, just the tip of the iceberg. The Soviet Union maintained a close connection with the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) and, later on, with both the African National Congress (ANC) and the South African Communist Party (SACP), the CPSA’s successor. This article attempts to assess the extent and importance of this connection, and its influence on South Africa’s transition to democracy and on the political players in today’s South Africa. The Russian Revolution, the Communist International and South Africa (1917–39) The February/March 1917 2 revolution in Russia – which the Bolsheviks later called the ‘bourgeois–democratic revolution’ – was greeted with delight by a broad spectrum of political forces in South Africa. The Bolshevik October/November revolution met a much more mixed reaction. Jan Smuts, soon to become prime minister, and in 1917 still a member of the British War cabinet, denounced it, but Barry Hertzog, leader of the National Party and a future prime minister, greeted it with pleasure. At the 1919 National Party convention, he declared that: ‘We are, in fact, Bolsheviks’. He explained, Bolshevism is the will of the people to be free, to rule itself and not to be subject to a foreign conqueror. Why do they want to suppress and kill Bolshevism today? Because freedom of the people is death to capitalism and imperialism. Don’t let us be afraid of Bolshevism. 3