Soviets on safari

By Julia Lovell

“Things Fall Apart”, the highlight of the “Red Africa” season at Calvert 22 Foundation in Shoreditch, London, takes visitors on a journey through time, back to a place barely imaginable to those not old enough to remember the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was a world in which the cold war still seemed wide open, and in which international communism triumphantly proclaimed its creation of a better, post-imperial way of life.

The first room of the exhibition, which explores Communist interventions in decolonised Africa, is dominated by a montage of Soviet propaganda films publicising the bountiful impact of the USSR. A beaming Leonid Brezhnev tours the continent, embracing his African counterparts and pouring aid into medicine, farming and industry. “The Soviet Union has many friends in the world,” booms the voiceover. “Long live the freedom of the peoples of Africa! Reaching out to a people in distress is the Soviet Union’s sacred duty.” An extended sequence advertises the ecstasies of being an African student in the Soviet Union: the cutting-edge facilities, the sleigh-rides with balalaikas, the comradely ballroom-dancing at “Friendship Evenings”.