Anti-fascism, Russian style: What was the ANC doing in Moscow this week?

Nomvula Mokonyane, ANC deputy secretary-general, fronts the party’s foreign policy and heads its international engagements.

This week on Africa Day, she was far removed from the continent, although the party’s 50th National Conference pledged: “The ANC has correctly placed the African continent very high in its international policy and international relations.”

Perhaps the cold shoulder given to the party and this country by other African states, following recent xenophobic outbreaks here, accounts for Mokonyane spending Africa Day reliving the Cold War in Moscow.

On Monday, the ANC breathlessly posted photographs of Mokonyane in Moscow with the caption “[She] was addressing the International Anti-Fascist Forum reaffirming the ANC’s commitment to international solidarity, peace and justice.”

There’s a lot to unpack and unpick in that sentence.

‘Anti-fascism’ is a fungible term in the hands of the conference hosts, both the Russian government and one of the very few showpiece political parties allowed by the Kremlin to operate in Putin’s dictatorship, the CPRF (Communist Party of the Russian Federation).

Readers may recall that the infamous Berlin Wall, erected in 1961, that imprisoned East Germans in the grim confines of the Soviet-controlled GDR, was officially called “the anti-fascist barrier” even if most Berliners preferred the title “the wall of shame”.

The passage of time has not dimmed the Soviet sense of euphemism, though. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has now lasted longer than the entire period of the USSR’s participation in World War 2, is officially called by Putin “a special military operation”. While prison awaits any dissenter who calls it otherwise, this four-year “operation” has cost a conservatively estimated 220 00 Russian lives. And unlike the Second World War, no victory is in sight for Moscow.

Quite what element of “peace and justice” the ANC deputy secretary-general managed to address in Russia this week is unclear.

However, the party did clarify, in another post, that Mokonyane “also held a bilateral engagement with CPRF chairman Gennady Zyuagonov ‘to strengthen relations and advance co-operation among progressive movements’”.

Since Putin, in fear of ever more penetrating Ukraine drone strikes into the heart of Russia, these days spends a lot of time in underground bunkers, Zyuganov will have to do.

He serves the equivalent role that Bantustan politicians performed here under apartheid: notionally in opposition to the regime but fully aligned with its outlook. And while Putin’s real opponents are either murdered in gulags or in exile overseas, Zyuganov has been allowed to contest the presidency four times, where he lost by landslides against Putin or his puppet candidates.

Still, it might have helped Mokonyane in her briefing notes to observe that Zyuganov wants to “re-Stalinise” Russia, even though the local Communists here have decided to break with the ANC and contest the local elections against it. Mokonyane, facing the headache of across-the-board defeats for her party in the November polls, doubtless cast an envious eye at Putin’s “managed democracy”, where paper candidates mask an authoritarian system.

But although Zyuganov and other puppet politicians in the Duma (parliament) parrot the Kremlin line on foreign and military policy, he did use the platform to warn earlier this month that his country faced a “repeat of 1917” (year of the Russian Revolution) unless the economy improved. Falling industrial production, crippling interest rates, and swingeing sanctions suggest that without an end plan for the war in Ukraine, its domestic costs could come at a high price. Even if regime change remains remote, as Owen Matthews wrote in The Spectator recently, “Putin remains firmly at the helm, but running on fumes, and without a map”.

However precarious – or not – Russia’s Putin may be, he and his country are in better, though somewhat battered, shape compared to other key ANC international allies. The comrades, fellow travellers in the “international progressive movement” for “solidarity, peace and justice”. The crowd Mokonayne confers with in her party’s furtherance of “international solidarity”.

Cuba, long the source of ANC inspiration, and provider of many exported doctors and recipient of SA aid, is in dreadful shape. Strangled by American pressure and blockades, and crippled by economic mismanagement over decades, its Communist regime, the object of much ANC worship, is on its last legs.

Twenty-two hours per day without electricity, Raul Castro now indicted for murder by the US Justice Department, starved of oil and basic foodstuffs, either domestic pressure or a US “law enforcement operation”, or some combination, could end the 67-year-old regime.

Of course, Donald Trump and his Cuban American secretary of state, Marco Rubio, might engage in the same euphemistic nonsense as the Russians do. And clearly and gravely underestimated the determination of the Iranian regime to hang on in the wake of his “excursion” or “little trip”, as Trump termed his war.

But if he mistook Iran for Venezuela, expecting Tehran’s capitulation in 72 hours after the US and Israel eliminated the Iranian leadership initially, it was the US capture of Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro that is the current cause of Cuba’s crisis.

Trump and the White House simply demanded that the new and US-approved Venezuelan leadership cut off the oil to Havana. And it hastily obliged, old ties cast aside.

Looking at Cuba on the brink of collapse, it is difficult to recall the power once projected by this Communist island.

The Wall Street Journal offered a reprise recently of how in 1961 it bested the US invasion at the Bay of Pigs, in 1962 it was the epicentre of nuclear confrontation between the US and USSR, and in 1970s and 1980s it sent 400 000 Cuban soldiers and support staff to Africa. This, the Journal noted, “was the largest deployment ever of a developing nation in the Cold War”.

Yet it was as a proxy for the once mighty Soviet Union that allowed Cuba to export revolution and support insurgencies in Africa and Latin America. And when the Soviet empire ended, Cuba could still rely on allies closer to hand, such as Argentina’s Peronist governments and, more crucially, the Chavista regime in Venezuela. Both have now gone, one democratically, the other courtesy of a US decapitation.

Now Cuba is bereft of significant allies and has only faded memories of revolution to sustain its regime, but likely not for long.

Even if the Iranian theocracy, another key ANC ally, outlasts the threadbare patience of a fickle Trump and manages to hold its grip on its people, it will be in reduced form compared to its heyday as regional fermenter and exporter of instability.

Sir Keir Starmer, the embattled UK prime minister, described today’s international situation as “a world more dangerous than at any time in my life”. And he was born in 1962, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which placed the world on the brink of nuclear annihilation.

Conferencing about “anti-fascism” in Moscow, antique pledges on “peace and justice” with parties and regimes that practise the very opposite might offer the warm glow of nostalgia of past struggle.

Time, though, for Mokonyane and the ANC to get a new roadmap or for the country to get more modern navigators.