ABSTRACT
The Soviet Union became involved in Africa with high hopes. But the policy of friendship with bourgeois nationalist regimes in the new states was not extended immediately to Black Africa, an area of minor strategic interest. The Soviet Union learned several important lessons from its initial phase of African involvement. The underlying characteristics of Soviet-African relations before the 1975 Angolan civil war are crucial to an understanding of the Soviet role in Southern Africa. Angola was not the first occasion on which the Soviet Union supplied arms to African conflicts, and Soviet-trained pilots had flown in other engagements. Guinea was given eight of them in 1960 and thirty-six were supplied to the Nigerian federal forces during the civil war. Soviet policy in Angola involved both continuity and change: continuity in Soviet support for an old friend and a weak ally; change in Soviet willingness to use military force to overcome that weakness.
