Apart from Afghanistan, the Soviet Union’s
policy in Asia was cautious. It supplied only
limited help to the North in the Vietnamese civil
war, and took care not to respond in kind to
American intervention on the ground. The most
serious problem in Asia was the hostility of China.
The Sino-Soviet split, which had opened up in
the days of Khrushchev, deepened with Mao’s radi-
calisation in the 1970s. Mao condemned Soviet
relaxation of repression as counter-revolutionary.
The Chinese also criticised the invasion of
Czechoslovakia and saw themselves as the only
true centre of the world communist movement.
This did not stop them from improving relations
with the US in the 1970s: in Chinese eyes, the
arch-enemy now was not Western imperialism but
Soviet ‘hegemony’. In 1969 serious armed clashes
occurred in places along the Sino-Soviet border,
the longest frontier in the world. The USSR had
stationed crack divisions armed with nuclear
missiles to defend its territory. A paranoia akin to
that provoked by the ‘yellow peril’ at the turn of
the century began to take a grip on the Kremlin.
The sheer size of China, with a population five
times greater than that of the Soviet Union, and
with a radical and xenophobic leadership, pre-
sented an increasingly nightmarish threat to
Moscow. From the 1960s until the early 1980s
periods of vituperative exchanges alternated with
Soviet efforts to place relations with Beijing on
a better footing. But everywhere in Asia, for
example in India and Vietnam, Soviet diplomacy
and aid were countered by Chinese diplomacy and
aid, as in Kampuchea and Pakistan.
The Soviet Union’s ambitions to extend its
influence to the Third World and the Middle East
in the 1960s and 1970s brought little reward and
created obstacles in the path of detente. In Africa,
poverty, ethnic and racial conflicts and the fierce
new nationalism provided fertile ground for the
proselytising of the authoritarian socialist system
as the only way out of the continent’s cycle of
devastation and deprivation. The Eastern bloc
gave support to movements struggling to over-
throw the last vestiges of white supremacy in
Portuguese Africa, Rhodesia and South Africa.
The global East–West struggle was thus extended
to Africa. But Moscow’s new clients were fickle.
When Nasser’s successor Anwar Sadat could
not get what he wanted from Moscow he showed
no gratitude for the huge amount of civil and mil-
itary aid (including training in modern weapons
technology) which Egypt had received – the largest
amount of aid the Soviet Union had supplied to
any single country during the two decades from
1955 to 1976: $4,750 million. In 1972, Sadat
ordered Soviet personnel to leave the country and
took over the installations and weapons they had
to leave behind. It was a valuable lesson: whatever
the complexity of the indigenous government,
socialist or not, its authoritarian leaders sought
only to exploit superpower rivalry in pursuit of
their own interests. Other African countries
accepted Soviet aid and tutelage only to break with
the Soviet Union, and expel Russian advisers. The
list is long: Algeria, Ghana, Mali, Sudan, Somalia
and Equatorial Guinea. More enduring was Soviet
influence in Ethiopia, Angola and Mozambique.
Colonel Gaddafi, the Libyan leader, proved more
of an embarrassment, since his support of terrorist
groups and his territorial ambitions in Chad have
been strong destabilising factors.
In the Middle East, Syria was Russia’s most
reliable ally. After the fall of the Shah of Iran in
1979, Iraq too became the recipient of Soviet
arms as Moscow sought to check Khomeini’s
Muslim fundamentalists, who cursed not only the
American devil but also atheistic Russia. With mil-
lions of Soviet Muslims susceptible to an Islamic
resurgence, Khomeini’s ideology posed a new
threat to Soviet stability.
In Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s the
Soviet Union had gained its first communist ally
in Cuba. Castro was no easy bedfellow and the
promise to purchase Cuba’s sugar crop, previ-
ously exported to the US, in order to keep the
Cuban economy afloat cost the USSR thousands
of dollars annually in the 1980s. The Soviet
Union’s client states in Africa, the Middle East
and Asia were a further enormous drain on
resources which were so badly needed to mod-
ernise the Soviet Union itself and raise the living
standards of the Russian people. World aid was
unpopular in the Soviet Union, whose citizens
point to the saying that charity should begin at
home.