Hilary Lynd - University of California, Berkeley

Living Together, Living Apart: The Soviet Ethnoterrorial Federation in Apartheid’s Mirror

Decolonization and the Cold War both came to an end in the heady years of the late 1980s and early 1990s. In this period, South African apartheid and Soviet socialism expired alongside one another. According to the ideologues of both socialism and apartheid, the Soviet and South African systems were mortal enemies. According to liberal and neoliberal ideologues, the two systems had much in common. From a perspective concerned with free markets and free elections, socialism and apartheid were both examples of unfreedom and state intervention gone wrong. But the Soviet state and the apartheid state presided not only over illiberal economies and undemocratic elections; both offered particular ways of organizing a multiethnic society. Confident that the USSR had answered its own national question, Soviets offered assistance to South African freedom fighters in answering theirs. The builders of the Friendship of the Peoples aided the would-be smashers of apartheid oppression until a perestroika-era crisis of faith; evidence seemed to suggest the Soviet Union had failed to solve its national question. If the Soviet Friendship of the Peoples was not so friendly, did that mean, by implication, that apartheid was not so oppressive? Should a diverse society pursue unification or partition? This paper will analyze the varied ways Soviets and South Africans dealt with their realization in the late 1980s that Soviet and South African approaches to organizing difference might not be that different. As the old orders in both places collapsed, the new orders required new ways to define freedom and liberation.

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