L. Fituni, I. Abramova Resource Potential of Africa and Russia's ...

copra, spices, other products of tropical agriculture, natural rubber
and some ores and fuels took place even before the war. However, it
is very difficult to establish the volume of such trade, since all of it
was effectuated by European colonial companies and the imported
goods were usually registered as originating from UK, France, Belgium,
and more rarely, from Italy.
As to the Soviet pre-war exports, only unsystematic records of
occasional grain deliveries to Egypt, Algeria and Tunis are available.
After the Second World War the Soviet Union signed its first
agreements on economic and technical cooperation with the countries
of the African continent: Egypt (1958), Guinea (1959) and
Ethiopia (1959). Those were later followed by similar documents
with the majority of newly independent African countries.
By the year 1989 (the de facto end the Soviet visibility in Africa)
such agreements have been signed with 36 African countries,
including Algeria, Angola, Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon,
Republic of Cape Verde, the Central African Republic, Chad,
the People's Republic of the Congo (Brazzaville), Egypt, Equatorial
Guinea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Libya,
Madagascar, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Morocco, Nigeria,
Niger, Rwanda, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Somalia, Sudan,
Tanzania, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe. 1 Those
agreements played an important role in stimulating mutual economic
exchanges and in Africa’s efforts to transform the colonial structure
of its economy.
Though today both in Russia and abroad much is written about
the “ideological nature” of that co-operation, in our view any honest
and competent researcher, would have to acknowledge, that by the
1980s the promotion of Marxist-Leninist ideas, played a secondary,
if not even a less important role in USSR’s relations with Africa. In
any case, that component of the Soviet foreign policy was gradually
losing its importance for the Kremlin.
Already during the Khrushchev period and further on till the
fall of the Communist regime in the USSR, the fundamental motives
for cooperation with African countries were: geopolitical,
133