South Africa, Russia and ten days that shook the world: Pretoria’s love affair with Moscow

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By the time this reaches you, I shall be a long way from Johannesburg and shall absent myself from the remainder of the trial. But I shall be in the country to which I said I would return when I was granted bail …. I have experienced great conflict between my desire to stay with my fellow accused and, on the other hand, to try to continue the political work I believe to be essential. My decision was made only because I believe that it is the duty of every true opponent of this government to remain in this country.

– Advocate Bram Fischer, underground leader of the South African Communist Party, writing to the magistrate to apologise for not attending court as one of the accused.

The White Mandela

– Honorific given to Fischer by Indian Hindu communists. Fischer was the first African recipient of the Lenin Peace Prize, Russia’s highest honour, which was awarded him in 1967.

The life of a communist revolutionary is no bed of roses. He has no time for worldly pleasures, and his whole life is devoted to the destruction of capitalist society, the removal of all forms of exploitation and the liberation of mankind … under a CP government, South Africa will become a land of milk and honey.

– Nelson Mandela, one-time CPSA member, in his handwritten tract, How to be a good communist

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For Moscow, Fischer was to South Africa what Togliatti was to Italy – a loyal communist, through and through, who was majorly responsible for persuading the ANC to emulate the multiracial South African Communist Party and take in other races as members

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In the second half of the Great War of 1914-1918, Russian conditions on the front were so dire as to lead to mutiny. Fifteen million Russian soldiers were living in mud up to their waists, with no hot food or clothes and no shelter against the freezing weather. The government was indifferent to their plight. Vasily Shulgin, a conservative politician to the State Duma, wrote bitterly, “And here we are, dancing the ‘last tango’ on the breast works of trenches choked with corpses.”

There was “chatter about treason”, he said.

Antony Beevor’s epic new book, entitled Russia: Revolution and civil war 1917-1921, superbly researched and just out, could not have been better timed, given the Wagner Group’s recent advance on Moscow. There are the most extraordinary echoes of what is happening right now in Russia, events that reprise those far-off “ten days that shook the world”, to paraphrase John Reed’s contemporary account.

Britain must prepare for the sudden collapse of Russia after the recent coup attempt against Putin, government advisors have warned this week. Few statements were more of a wake-up call to a populace somewhat inured to the daily monotone reporting on the war in Ukraine.

Suddenly, everyone is aware that great events, echoing the 1917 October Revolution and subsequent civil war, have been happening in Russia. Is Putin finished? Probably not, for the moment, but the Wagner mercenary group, encouraged initially by Putin as a “plausibly deniable” outsourced war machine for Moscow in Africa and Ukraine, clearly has an uncertain future, even though the Russian foreign office has insisted that things will continue as usual.

There are implications for Pretoria in this upheaval. South Africa has “skin in the game”, supporting African peacekeepers on a continent already beset with several wars that could get worse. The French military, replaced in several former French colonies by Wagner, may yet have to return militarily to countries like Mali and elsewhere to stabilise things, if the Russians were to pull out.

With fortuitous, if accidental, timing, the EU has also just hosted a peace summit in the middle of the Russian crisis, to discuss the outlook for Ukraine. To everyone’s surprise, key Brics members India, Brazil and South Africa attended as well; despite being invited several times, China recused herself.

Does this mean, in the wake of President Ramaphosa’s somewhat abortive African peace mission to Ukraine days before the Wagnerian coup attempt, that Pretoria sees an opportunity to reinforce its non-aligned status with Washington and repair some of the Lady R arms scandal damage? Maybe, maybe not. Pretoria no doubt has a degree of separation anxiety. But it does seem probable now that at least Ramaphosa will not have to worry about the International Criminal Court and Putin’s attendance at the forthcoming South African-hosted Brics summit, if indeed this takes place at all. Beth van Schaack, the US ambassador-at-large for global criminal justice, said Putin would not dare risk arrest by attending.

When all is said and done, however, like lifelong school friends, Pretoria and Moscow are most unlikely to drift apart too much, even if Putin leaves the scene. The friendship with the ANC runs too deep, and whichever faction of the ANC is dominant, it knows it owes its accession to power in 1994 to the Russians – and, more especially, to Bram Fischer, a white Afrikaner and the first recipient of the Lenin Peace Prize on the African continent. A Russian icon – that’s what Fischer is in the South African context, up high with Nelson Mandela.

For Moscow, Fischer was to South Africa what Togliatti was to Italy – a loyal communist, through and through, who was majorly responsible for persuading the ANC to emulate the multiracial South African Communist Party and take in other races as members, an essential pre-condition for support of the South African class and liberation struggle by Moscow. South Africa, because of its large white population, was always regarded as a “special type” of British colony by the Soviets, different from other African countries. The whites were never simply going to be wished away, but their potential could be harnessed in the struggle.

A century and a quarter of friendship

Ironically, it was with white Afrikaners that Russia initially forged a partnership. Russia and South Africa have a very long history together. During the Anglo-Boer War (1899 to 1902), there was significant Russian support for the Boers, both materially and spiritually. As RW Johnson, the historian, has noted, “Russian conservatives were pro-Boer not only for the usual nationalist, anti-British reasons, but because they thought the Boers were like the best sort of Russians – conservative, rural, Christian folk resisting the invasion of their land.”

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The national anthem of the Transvaal was allegedly played by Russian orchestras, committees were set up to collect money for the Transvaal, and church services offered up prayers for a British defeat.

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The national anthem of the Transvaal was allegedly played by Russian orchestras, committees were set up to collect money for the Transvaal, and church services offered up prayers for a British defeat. In newspaper serials and novels, the men of the kommandos were portrayed as heroes battling the arrogant British. Such was the popular enthusiasm that inns, restaurants and cafés are said to have been given Afrikaans names and redecorated in the “Boer style” to improve business.

The Communist Party (CP) in South Africa was founded in 1921, inspired and aided by the International Socialist League and international communist organisations, and the first ANC leader to visit communist Russia, Josiah Tshangana Gumede, did so in 1927. He had earlier attended a meeting of the league against Imperialism in Belgium, and travelled directly from there to Moscow.

Ever since Lenin, the Russians had an international agenda to support and encourage the establishment of communist parties in foreign countries when conditions were right, as in the white miners’ strike on the Reef in 1924; and there is plenty of literature that captures the modus operandi of establishing a CP. Two brilliant recent books by Caroline Moorehead (see bibliography) focusing on the contribution of CP women in the resistance against fascism in France and Italy give us a precise picture of the blueprint.

Generally speaking, an exiled representative of the local CP would be based in Moscow, acting as the conduit for Russian funds and support, including arms and tactical advice. In Italy’s case, it was Togliatti. France was represented by Maurice Thorez, the PCF leader in exile.

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In South Africa, Bram Fischer set the tone. The Russians, who had an embassy in Pretoria through which support could be funnelled, trusted him as a competent revolutionary.

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In South Africa, Bram Fischer set the tone. The Russians, who had an embassy in Pretoria through which support could be funnelled, trusted him as a competent revolutionary. Stan Uys, the doyen of South African correspondents in the UK, who had known Fischer personally, once told me that Bram was a dedicated communist, tough as old boots, a true son of South Africa, despite attempts by South African novelists like Nadine Gordimer and André Brink to romanticise him in the Che Guevara mould. Other writers have said much the same thing; even when comrades were taken aback by Stalin’s pact with Hitler, Fischer loyally stuck to the Stalin party line at all times.

This seems to have been a patria leitmotiv of many trusted communist leaders in other countries as well – “Ubi bene, ibi patria” (I’m at home where I feel well) – never taking the easy way out, as so many South African leftists did when the going got tough, by emigrating. Even when he was offered the opportunity on a plate, when he knew he faced prison, Bram rejected this option and voluntarily returned to join his comrades who had no such options. Everything written about Bram Fischer, including the marvellous biography of him by Hannes Haasbroek (’n Seun soos Bram), says Fischer was never judgemental when others said they were leaving; but he also left people in no doubt where he stood himself.

According to the Moscow playbook, once core CP members were established, broad recruiting could commence. New members were signed up. In those countries where the CP was legal – and the CP was legal from its inception in South Africa until going underground in 1950, following the Suppression of Communism Act – the form was like that of any other political party. But, of course, the communists were not like any other party, and were seen as the spearhead of Bolshevism throughout the capitalist world, and so they were intensively surveilled, as the expression goes.

Where there was resistance to the CP, a popular front or a national front might be set up, a movement comprising anyone, not just communists, who opposed the government of the day. Spain in the thirties provided a good example, as did France and Italy. In WWII, in France, when it became clear that the communists were not alone in backing the resistance, it was decided to coordinate their forces under a National Front for the Independence of France.

The French communists were the strongest group in the National Front and set the agenda, even though they soon came up against the Gaullists. Tensions developed, and eventually General De Gaulle’s representative in France, the resistance leader Jean Moulin, was betrayed by fellow resistants on misguided political grounds. The eightieth anniversary of his capture was this year. He died under torture.

In South Africa, the equivalent of a Front honour belonged to the Congress of Democrats of the fifties. Helen Joseph, in her insightful memoir (see bibliography), captures this era perfectly.

The CP was expected to provide the crucial element of leadership in such a front, calling the shots. Stalin redefined the war, after the Germans invaded Russia in 1941, to being a “great anti-fascist and patriotic war of liberation”. This immediately became the crusading call to arms of CPs everywhere, including in South Africa.

The other thing worth mentioning is the need in many countries where the CP was engaged in a struggle with the authorities, for an Organisation Speciale – a group of armed men to protect militants and to punish traitors and informers, and also to collect weapons and plan acts of sabotage.

In South Africa’s case, the need for just such an Organisation Speciale resulted in MK – Umkhonto weSizwe – details and objectives of which were aired at the extraordinary trial of Mandela, Walter Sisulu and others, where Bram, at that time secret underground leader of the CP, was also simultaneously acting as defence lead for the accused, who faced the death penalty. They were sentenced to life imprisonment; whether this was owed to Mandela’s defence team or international pressure has never really been clear.

A boy like Bram – ’n Seun soos Bram

GDH Cole is not an especially familiar name to South Africans, but between this charming Oxford don and Cyril Ramaphosa’s and the ANC’s love affair with Russia, lies a discernible golden thread.

For it was Cole, an established socialist and devotee of Karl Marx, who introduced the young Bram Fischer, scion of Afrikaner aristocracy (his grandfather was a premier of the Orange Free State colony), to socialism and communism in 1932.

Fischer was, at this stage of his life, a Rhodes scholar, ensconced in the ivory towers of Oxford’s New College. He attended lectures by Cole, and he discovered the October Club circle, where the 1917 Russian Revolution was commemorated. Likewise, the Labour Club offered young Fischer an intellectual home. As Haasbroek says, Fischer was still searching for an ideological direction, and socialism was perhaps more to his taste than communism per se at that stage, although this was to change after a visit to Russia in the summer of 1932.

In his letters home, Bram extolled the virtues of the Soviet Union development programme. He was deeply impressed at the ethnic and racial inclusivity of communism in practice, reconciling 100 nationalities in one country. He saw that such a system might achieve the same annealing result in ethnically fractured South Africa.

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Bram Fischer was already swimming against the tide of racial convention in the Union.

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Bram Fischer was already swimming against the tide of racial convention in the Union. He had played with black children as a child himself; and anecdotally, he had had a personal crisis of conscience at Grey College in Bloemfontein, the Afrikaans Eton of South Africa, where he’d apparently snubbed the visiting Prince of Wales, and then refused to shake the hand of a black gardener who had misread his anti-Imperial motive and congratulated him. He was immediately bitterly ashamed of his rudeness, but it had a salutary effect, serving to politicise him, especially after his teacher, Leo Marquard – founder of the National Union of South African Students (Nusas) in 1924, and later a founder of the Liberal Party in 1953 – offered young Bram an editorial student job with the Nusas journal. Marquard had a profound influence on Bram by all accounts, introducing him to a deep sense of the racial injustices in South Africa at that time.

Now, here in Oxford, he was receptive to a new left-wing ideological path, advanced by GDH Cole. Fischer embraced socialism with fervour, travelling to Vienna and then Russia, where he spent many weeks and where he became a convert to Stalin’s industrial and agricultural programme.

On his return to South Africa in 1934, Fischer enthused his wife-to-be, Molly, who shared his political views, and eventually they joined the South African Communist Party, which was at that stage the only multiracial political organisation in South Africa, and therefore a logical platform from which to fight racial segregation.

The rest, as they say, is history, and there is already a staggering amount written about Bram Fischer, including biographies by the score. But for my money, the best and most personal book about him to date is in Afrikaans by Hannes Haasbroek, ’n Seun soos Bram, where the author enjoyed exclusive access to family papers and personal letters. Martin Meredith’s excellent Fischer’s choice is another, as is Alan Paton Award winner Stephen Clingman’s Bram Fischer: Afrikaner revolutionary. Of course, it’s essential to read around the actual man to get context as well – The young Mandela by David Smith and Time longer than rope by Edward Roux create a reasonably coherent package in this regard.

In sum, cutting to the chase, Bram Fischer moved to Johannesburg and pursued a legal career. He befriended Walter Sisulu, also a communist. The circle grew. The ANC, in those days, was very much an Africanist movement. No whites, Indians or coloureds as members as such. But when Dr AB Xuma, the mover and shaker in the organisation and an Africanist opposed to racially diluting the ANC, approached Fischer as a lawyer and asked him to help draft a constitution for the ANC, Bram and Sisulu perceived an opportunity to make the ANC a multiracial organisation.

After some deft footwork and the displacement of AB Xuma, Walter Sisulu assumed the mantle at the ANC Youth League. Nelson Mandela, working for Sidelsky’s law firm and studying law at Wits, met Bram through legal channels in 1942. Mandela was rapidly brought on as a likely candidate for high office in the ANC by Fischer and Sisulu, and he completely subscribed to the need to bring whites into the movement. He also joined the CP and was, for a time, a member of the CP central committee.

One argument deployed in favour of going multiracial was that Soviet Russia and countries like Sweden, fervently anti-colonial, were poised to aid liberation movements throughout the world, fighting American, British and French imperialism. In fact, Russia already had form in this regard, having helped the left-wing Republicans in Spain in the thirties, and receiving visitors from communist parties abroad. Money was beginning to flow, and arms to be used, in the struggle. For the cash-strapped ANC, this practical support was vital and would become much more so in the years ahead.

In the sixties, after the Rivonia Trial and after Bram Fischer’s own trial – when he, Mandela and other key leaders of the resistance against apartheid were sent to prison for life (and during which Bram Fischer died) – the mantle of ANC and SACP leadership fell to others. The ANC, now underground and essentially dominated by its SACP ally, began training for a guerrilla war offensive. Camps were established in Angola and elsewhere; training took place in East Germany and Russia. Jacob Zuma and Joe Slovo, both SACP central committee members, were trained abroad in military and intelligence gathering techniques.

In 1978, Moscow sent Oliver Tambo, then president of the ANC, to Vietnam, in company with Joe Slovo, Moses Mabhida, Thabo Mbeki and other senior leaders in the ANC and SACP. Their purpose was to learn how Hanoi had triumphed with a people’s revolutionary war against the American-backed Saigon administration, bringing communist rule to Vietnam.

In a riveting account by Anthea Jeffery of this Vietnam visit in People’s war: New light on the struggle for South Africa, we learn that Tambo and his comrades were not deterred by the harsh realities of the Vietnamese communist dictatorship. Almost overnight after seizing power, the communists had wiped out the savings of the middle class through currency “reform” and devaluation, achieved a blanket expropriation of small and medium businesses in a single night, collectivised thousands of small farms, shut down newspapers, organised children into “vanguard groups” to spy on their parents, introduced a class system based on political connections, debased the health system to one accessible only to the party faithful, and allowed corruption to flourish. As Jeffrey says, all the elements of traditional Stalinism were present: control of internal movement and destruction of the private sector, accompanied by irrational economic policies, state control over the “allocation” of jobs and housing, and so forth.

The most important lesson the South Africans learned was how to win a multi-faceted people’s war, in which conventional military engagements would play only a small part, but propaganda would become the key element by eroding the will of the “enemy” to fight. The Russians helped the Vietnamese with a carefully designed propaganda campaign that increasingly persuaded the American public that the US could never win the war, says Jeffrey. Hanoi’s propaganda, often uncritically echoed by Western media, was very effective.

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Ramaphosa is on record, according to Jeffrey, that the ANC is pursuing a 25-year programme against private property rights.

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The ANC delegation returned to South Africa with a two-phase plan, the first leg of which was to win power, which they did in 1994, employing the people’s army tactics. Then, they embarked on the second phase, says Jeffrey, bringing about a gradual transition to socialism. The written brief on how to achieve this warned that a degree of tactical caution was needed so as to retain wide support for the ANC. However, at bottom, the ultimate socialist objective should be pursued, promoting an increasing mass understanding that there can be no true national liberation without social emancipation.

Ramaphosa is on record, according to Jeffrey, that the ANC is pursuing a 25-year programme against private property rights. The idea was to achieve this without frightening the property-owning classes in the same way that you might boil a frog – slowly raising the temperature so the frog is not prompted to jump out of the water.

If this is true, and given that Ramaphosa believes the ANC is electorally impregnable as the liberation movement of South Africa, there is no reason to think that the link with Russia will weaken, especially since Russian propaganda over Ukraine – driven by enormous online resources – seems to be working. There is a parallel reality argument beginning to creep into Western media. It is leading to a defeatist posture on support for Ukraine. A majority of Germans, for example, apparently now believe Berlin has given enough support to Zelensky. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has also long believed Putin mustn’t be humiliated – in fact, that charges of war crimes against him should take a back seat in favour of negotiation – and you can’t negotiate with a prisoner. And when it comes to South Africa, according to political risk analyst Brendan von Essen in the Daily Maverick (3 June 2023):

Moscow is heavily invested in ensuring that South Africa retains its Russia-friendly attitude. South Africa’s uncritical stance towards Russia in key forums such as the UN, the G20, the AU and BRICS is invaluable to Moscow in the face of the international condemnation of Russia’s ongoing war on Ukraine … even the slightest hint that the ANC could lose power in 2024 will be of concern to Putin as this would likely result in South Africa adopting a far more pro-Western foreign policy. Russia will want to mitigate this risk.

Space doesn’t allow a broader discussion, in this article in any event, of the critical support given to the ANC by the Russians in Angola, which frustrated Pretoria’s attempts under PW Botha to build a cordon sanitaire, a defence-in-depth barrier. The great tactical battles where the Russians helped the Cubans take control of the air, were decisive in this regard.

For all of these historical and current realpolitik reasons, the ANC is linked at the hip to Moscow and may well, swallowing Putin’s propaganda, believe that in the end, Moscow can yet prevail in its current war. Even if it doesn’t, the ANC will likely continue, like Bram Fischer, to give complete loyalty to an old comrade.

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