The End of Cold War Solidarity

This innovative multi-archival study explores the myriad and unexpected connections between the USSR and Mozambique during the last decades of state socialism, decolonization and Cold War. Drawing on documents and oral histories in three languages, Elizabeth Banks explores how leaders, bureaucrats, and ordinary citizens used diplomacy, culture, fishing, debt, trade, and delegation exchange to build Mozambican-Soviet connections throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Socialist connections like these played a key role in the process of post-colonial state-building, and fundamentally shaped the lives of individuals in the second half of the twentieth century. As Banks shows, symbolic promises of solidarity wrestled with shared material constraints to render visible international connections more valuable. These same dynamics helped cement credit relations as the core of Soviet development provision during late socialism, ultimately undermining the struggle for alternative forms of economic sovereignty during decolonization.