People’s war and Soviets
Carol Paton stated in her feature on Mangosuthu Buthelezi that the “people’s war” concept in SA was a result of an ANC visit to Vietnam in 1978 (“Mangosuthu Buthelezi: Tambo tainted my legacy”, September 16). This is incorrect.
In the late 1960s, Soviet leadership commissioned a short course for various third world guerrilla movements that looked to Moscow for aid. Known as military combat work (MCW), it was given to movements that sent missions to Moscow. The MCW recommended “people’s war” and how guerrillas should infiltrate their home countries and establish “points of influence” there.
Many at the course made notes, including MK activists, with the result that various versions of the MCW circulated in the ANC. In the mid1970s this was standardised as a single version by Bill Anderson and Ronnie Kasrils. The concept was old hat in the ANC and MK by then. It was further codified in Joe Slovo’s Planning for People’s War document, which had a wide and influential circulation in the ANC. What happened, as Irina Filatova shows in “The Hidden Thread”, was the Soweto uprising in 1976. This led to strong Soviet criticism of the ANC: it was clear the ANC had no control over these events, and Black Consciousness stole a march on the ANC.
Given that Soviets paid for most ANC activities, there was disappointment in Moscow at the ANC’s weak performance and suggestions that the USSR should look around for alternatives to the ANC. This eventuated a decade later in suggestions that the USSR should shift its support from the ANC to the National Party government, seen as more “serious”. Moscow hosted ANC missions for nearly two decades and had little confidence in its capability or competence.
In the critical atmosphere created by Soweto events, the ANC’s Soviet advisers told them their notion of guerrilla warfare being rooted among the peasants in the countryside — the classic version popularised by Mao, Castro and others — was not working. They needed to study how the people’s war concept was applied elsewhere. They suggested the ANC send a mission to Vietnam, so even that was really a Soviet initiative. But by then the concept of “people’s war” was long established. The effect of Soviet pressure on the ANC after 1976 was to make the party sensitive to the need to establish “points of influence” over urban insurrections and to try to build bases within townships and informal settlements. All this was clearly established by Filatova (my wife, who had access to the Moscow archives, which contain large amounts of material on the ANC). She is again at work in the Moscow archives. I find it hard to understand how her ground-breaking research on these matters is not being taken into account.
RW Johnson Via e-mail