The World

In early 1977, Castro received requests for help from Mengistu in Ethiopia, and sent 16,000 troops. ‘We felt obliged to help the Ethiopians,’ he said, ‘and do our bit.’ Soon after the suffocating of Haile Selassie, Ethiopia started to disintegrate: insurgents in Tigray and Eritrea intensified their rebellions at the centre. The revolution consumed its children. ‘We’ll tackle our enemies that come face to face with us,’ said Mengistu, ‘and we won’t be stabbed in the back. We’ll arm the comrades and avenge the blood of our comrades double and triple fold.’ Mengistu and Atnafu drew pistols on each other in meetings as their rivalry simmered. On 3 February 1977, Mengistu carried out a purge of the Standing Committee of the Derg, pulling out a machine gun and personally mowing down his comrades, killing fifty-eight Derg officers. He was then elected chairman and emerged as dictator, basing his Terror – Qey Shibir

– on that of Lenin in 1918. Brezhnev and Castro were impressed. ‘Mengistu strikes me as a quiet, honest and convinced leader,’ Castro concluded. ‘He’s an intellectual personality who showed his wisdom on 3 February … He had the rightists arrested and shot.’ His rival Atnafu had been out of town on 3 February, but he was executed later that year.

‘We want to assure you, Comrade Brezhnev,’ said Mengistu on a visit to the Kremlin, ‘we’ll sacrifice everything for the revolution.’ This was not hyperbole. ‘Death to counter-revolutionaries,’ he cried at a rally, dementedly smashing bottles of red fluid. But his Terror was also an imperial fight-back: ‘We fought them when they sought to dismember the nation.’ Mengistu was responsible for 750,000 deaths. But the Somalians were advancing towards Harar in eastern Ethiopia; in Tigray, a talented scholar called Meles Zenawi, just twenty-two, who had won the top Haile Selassie prize at the best school in Addis, founded the Marxist–Leninist League of Tigray that bizarrely supported Enver Hoxha in Albania against all the great powers; in Eritrea, a Marxist fanatic, Isaias ‘Isu’ Afwerki, trained in Beijing, was armed by China. Soviet Ethiopia was in jeopardy; Castro airlifted more troops.

After a triumphant progress across Africa visiting Neto and Mengistu, Castro flew on to Moscow to join Brezhnev celebrating yet another success: Communists had seized power in Afghanistan.

Shah Zahir, son of the founding monarch of the dynasty, had successfully navigated the Cold War as Soviets and Americans bid to back Afghan projects, but he was much closer to the Soviets: Kabul had been Khrushchev’s first South Asian visit. The KGB funded a Communist Party that was divided between Pashtun-and Farsi-speaking factions just as the shah’s reforms sparked an Islamicist movement. In 1973, the shah was overthrown by his cousin and long-serving premier, Prince Daoud, who was supported by the Communists. But his reforms disappointed while his claims of Pashtunistan in Pakistan led its premier Bhutto to start funding Islamists through his secret service ISI. When Brezhnev complained about American interference in Afghanistan, Daoud defied him and started arresting Communists.

In April 1978 Communist troops stormed the palace and machine-gunned Daoud and family, including women and children, tossing them into a mass grave. Nur Muhammad Taraki – a veteran writer of Afghan socialist-realist novels who combined bon vivant womanizing with fanatical Marxism – took control and proclaimed himself ‘the Genius of the East’. He grew so overconfident and out of touch that he boasted to the KGB, ‘Come back in a year – the mosques will be empty!’

Brezhnev regarded Taraki as a fellow Leninist and backed his programme of secular education, land reform and female rights – much of it not dissimilar to what the Americans would try to impose after 9/11. But their radical reforms alienated the conservative Afghans, while the Pashtun faction started murdering their moderate Tajik rivals. The Soviets advised them to stop killing each other, yet ‘They continue to execute people who disagree with them,’ said Soviet premier Kosygin. As mujahedin (Islamicist guerrillas) launched an anti-Communist jihad, Taraki begged for Soviet troops and massacred any opposition, his premier Hafizullah Amin killing around 30,000 in the first eighteen months. Then in September 1979 Amin arrested Taraki and, claiming that Brezhnev had given him permission, had the old man strangled. Brezhnev was upset; the countryside seethed with jihadis; the Russians were losing control and the KGB chairman, Yuri Andropov, had an old-fashioned solution – poison.