USSR and Nkrumah’s Project of the Union of African States, 1963–1965 (Based on Russian Archival Materials)

Abstract

Drawing on declassified documents housed in the Russian Federation Archives of Foreign Policy (Arkhiv vneshnei politiki Rosssiyiskoi Federatsii, AVP RF) and the Russian State Archive of Contemporary History (Rossiyiskiyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv noveisheyi istorii, RGANI), the details of a secret 1963 mission of Soviet experts to Ghana, and its political consequences are investigated. The purpose of the mission was to elaborate constituent documents of the Union of African States, which the Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah sought to create. Thus, Professor Vladimir Ya. Aboltin was tasked to design an economic program of the Union. He advanced the idea of establishing a Pan-African Customs Union and the Central African Bank which would issue a common currency. He also proposed to industrialize Africa and to work out the intra-African infrastructure projects, as well as to develop Sahara gradually. Aboltin believed that the way he chartered for African economic integration would “weaken the overall position of imperialism, which employs new forms of colonialism in Africa.” On his return to Moscow, Aboltin submitted a comprehensive secret memo “On Pan-Africanism” to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CC CPSU). Pan-Africanism was defined as an “ideology, racist in its basis, not compatible with Marxism-Leninism,” an “utopia divorced from reality.” He advised the Soviet leadership not to treat pan-Africanists as reliable allies, even if they declared a socialist path of development, including Nkrumah whose conception of Nkrumaism was “a mixture of all sorts of things.” Given Aboltin’s assessment, the Soviet leaders reacted with restraint to the May 1965 request of the Ghanaian Minister of Foreign Affairs Kojo Botsio to allocate 300 million pounds to his country for “the struggle to achieve inter-African unity based on socialist principles.”