Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses on the memories of those Soviet military interpreters who assisted in the training of Southern African soldiers at the Perevalnoye military camp from 1965 onwards, during the three decades when the USSR's commitment to internationalism shaped and justified Moscow’s foreign policy.

Paper long abstract:

The Military Training Centre in the village of Perevalnoye in Soviet Ukraine was set up in 1965 at a time when the Southern African libration movements were determined to expand their guerrilla armies. During its 25-year existence, around 18 thousand fighters are estimated to have passed through Perevalnoye military hub, including soldiers from the PAIGC, FRELIMO, MPLA, ZAPU, ANC and SWAPO, as well as the liberation movements from Latin America and the Middle East, including the Palestinian PLO. These extremely diverse cohorts of soldiers met each other at this camp, exchanging their ideas about anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism and guerrilla warfare, and imagining a very diverse array of socialist futures. By focusing on the interviews and published memoirs of the Soviet military interpreters who had been working in Perevalnoye with ANC, ZAPU, MPLA and FRELIMO fighters, this paper explores the vernacular understandings of internationalism provided by these Soviet men. It demonstrates how their perceptions were influenced and sometimes challenged by the complex reality of the military training in camp and by the highly varied cohorts of Southern African soldiers that arrived for training. It argues that political imaginary of internationalism was grounded on many different levels: on the daily experience of human interaction in military fields and different notions of soldiering, that each army brought to the camp, on the shared histories of the anti-imperialist wars, including Vietnam and Cuba, as well as the Soviet histories of the Great Patriotic War and the October Revolution.