Soviet nostalgia blinds us to a clear wrong on Russia’s part

Even a violent conflict occurring thousands of kilometres away has a way of reminding us of our divided past and of exposing the fact that, three decades after the official end of the Cold War, too many of our compatriots — some in positions of authority — remain prisoners of that era.

Understandable, perhaps, given that for much of the period between the banning of anti-apartheid organisations in 1960 and their unbanning in 1990, South African politics was intricately intertwined with the Cold War in the Global North.

Those who were fighting to maintain the status quo — or to bring about minimal reforms that would remove some aspects of the offensive apartheid system while avoiding majority rule — identified themselves as part of the “free world” and its efforts at fending off threats from “behind the Iron Curtain”.

Their adversaries, on the other hand, had grown fond of the Soviet Union and like-minded countries largely because this bloc consistently gave material, political and moral support to the liberation struggle — even at a time when condemning Pretoria for its deplorable policies was not universally in vogue.

Hence, as the freedom movement spread like wildfire across SA in the final decade of apartheid, new informal neighbourhoods were given such names as Moscow, Russia and Czechoslovakia. Parents didn’t go as far as their Zimbabwean counterparts who, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, would name their children Vladimir, Mao, Ho Chi Minh or even Stalin. But townships did have people going by such nicknames as Tovarisch, Russki, moRashiya and Gorbachev in the heyday of the struggle.

There were songs, too, dedicated entirely to praising countries in the socialist bloc.

To this day you will find veterans of the 1980s struggle who get emotional and nostalgic when they sing “Soviet people/ lovely people/ here we are far from home/We will miss you/ we shall love you/ for the things you’ve done for us ...”

“Siyowabonga ngani amaCubano/AmaRashiya — How will we thank the Cubans/the Russians” goes another song to the chant of “tabarisho”, a bastardisation of tovarisch — Russian for “comrade”.

That is how deep the ties ran during the struggle days. And despite the struggle to end apartheid being over and the Soviet bloc being a thing of the past, there are still too many who see the world through those blinkers and feel obliged to defend Russia at every turn, even when it is committing atrocities, because it supported our liberation struggle.

That Vladimir Putin’s Russia bears no relation to the old Soviet Union that supported the likes of the ANC in the past escapes them, as does the fact that the Ukraine they are happy to see being bombed out of existence was as much a part of the Soviet Union they fondly sing about as Russia.

This misguided loyalty to Moscow has made them apply double standards when dealing with instability in parts of Africa.

The very people who are vocal, rightly so, about the destabilisation that is caused by French behaviour in its former colonies in West Africa, refuse to speak up against Russian mercenaries propping up illegitimate regimes in countries like the Central African Republic.

Over the past two weeks, they have used every justification they could find to avoid condemning Putin and his government for invading another country and causing the death and displacement of hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

One does not have to be a fan of the Ukrainian government or a defender of Nato and the US to see that Putin is the aggressor in the current conflict.

What was the struggle for national liberation here in SA, other parts of Africa as well as elsewhere in the world for if it was not a fight for every nation’s right to selfdetermination, to sovereignty?

Surely, for countries that were at the receiving end of foreign domination through the use of violent force, the first instinct when such happens anywhere else is to protest. But our nostalgia for friends of a bygone era is causing us to abandon our values and give legitimacy to the colonialist and imperialist logic that, through might, some countries have authority over others.

Far from showing loyalty to those who stood with SA in its struggle for freedom, the refusal to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is the betrayal of the very anti-colonial struggle some claim to be descendants of.

History should have taught us that once bullies like Putin are done with their weaker neighbours in their own continent, they turn their deadly arsenal to “weaker” continents like ours.