Scholar Apollon Davidson is a living link between Russia and South Africa, writes Shaun de Waal
The histories of South Africa and Russia are curiously intertwined, going all the way back to Jan van Riebeeck. In his journal, the first official colonist expressed the desire for help from a Russian with experience in the exploitation of seals, with which Table Bay was then profusely populated.
Today, many of South Africa’s parliamentarians are people who got a Soviet education, whether military, ideological or historical. Tony Yengeni, for instance, who was one of them, stands in a tradition that goes back to Yusuf Dadoo and GB Marks, who visited the Soviet Union in the Thirties and studied and strategised there.
Between those dates lies a long series of contacts, moving from the tens of thousands of Jewish immigrants who came from Russian territories, back to the presence of Russians – covering the spectrum from tsarists to Bolsheviks – on the Boer side in the Anglo-Boer War. This episode is the subject of The Russians and the Anglo-Boer War (Human &Rousseau), a new book by Russian academic Apollon Davidson and his former student Irina Filatova (now teaching at Durban university), and if anyone is qualified to record and comment on the story of Russian-South African connections, it is Professor Davidson.
Born in Siberia, he was the son of a Jew exiled there by Stalin. As a child, he survived the German siege of Leningrad (St Petersburg). He recalls from his schooldays the popularity of novels about the Boers (a fertile genre for Jules Verne, among others), novels which were reprinted again and again well into the Sixties.
As a student in Leningrad in the late Forties, Davidson conceived an interest in African history, and in the following decades became Moscow’s leading scholar of Africa. The boom in African studies after the beginnings of decolonisation in the Fifties meant that Davidson found himself in demand, notwithstanding his persistent refusal to join the communist party. He was, however, barred from visiting the capitalist world until 1981, when he was 52.
This man with the courtly style of an old- world gentleman (whose books include one on Cecil John Rhodes) taught at Lumumba University, set up for African exiles, and at the secret think-tank, as one might call it now, known as the Lenin School. A good number of the African National Congress’s upper echelon passed through his hands. “When I was a teacher of ANC people, I sympathised,” he says wryly, “but now they’re on top I can criticise.” He is concerned, in particular, about corruption.
But, for the moment, uppermost in Davidson’s mind is the closure of the Centre for Russian Studies at the University of Cape Town, which he has headed since it was set up – with money from a Russian corporation and a message of support from Nelson Mandela – in 1994. Changes in funding priorities at UCT have meant that the centre (like others at universities elsewhere in South Africa) will close.
Yet it can’t be costing the university much, relatively speaking, to house two or three staffers in four rooms. The rooms are lined with books collected by Davidson himself: Russian literature in Russian and in English, books on Russian history and politics (a shelf or two of Marx, a shelf or two “against Marx”), as well as a large amount of books on South Africa, for the use of Russians or others who might need to know about this country.
Davidson is dedicated to the possibilities of trans-national cross-pollination, and is upset at the closure of the centre a mere four years after its opening, which was attended by Thabo Mbeki and Kader Asmal, with Pallo Jordan to read the absent president’s speech. Messages of support were received from the Russian minister of culture, the mayor of St Petersburg, as well as Nadine Gordimer and Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko (who urged the reading of Russian poetry, “the key to the Russian soul”).
“Closing the centre is a tragedy for Russian-South African relations,” says Davidson unequivocally, as we watch the news on Russian television, beamed by satellite into his office. (Miners are striking in Siberia.) In his message at the centre’s opening, Mandela had said: “Building [a] better world … will be made easier by drawing institutions like this toward policy-making. As the lessons of the post-Cold War play out, we are understanding more and more how important it is to link the world of government and the world of learning.”
As Lauren Singer, the centre’s senior secretary, points out, it is impossible to understand today’s geopolitical situation (“why is the United States so strong?”) without coming to terms with Russia’s role in the history of the century.
As an historian, Davidson ackowledges the usefulness of Marxist economic and social analysis, but, he says, “The historian has to use many methods.” The Russians and the Anglo-Boer War, for instance, required a more anecdotal approach. “He takes everything,” says Singer. “He doesn’t reject things. He is non-partisan, and is able to look at things objectively.”
Davidson has been working on the recently revealed material in the Russian state archives, which were opened to public and scholastic inquiry for the first time by Boris Yeltin. Aside from the unique materials sought out by Davidson for his Boer war book, such as diaries, letters and photographs kept by descendants, the archives proved invaluable. There, he found the diary of the last tsar, in which Nicholas II records his approval of Boer victories (a sentiment he shared, incidentally, with Leo Tolstoy).
The archives opened the way to discoveries about more recent history, too, such as the fate of suspected dissidents under Stalin. South African Judith Kalk, for example, was searching for the truth about what happened to her uncle, Lazar Bach, a South African communist who disappeared after he was summoned to the Soviet Union along with the Richter brothers in 1935.
The ideological issue in question was whether a “native republic” should precede a socialist revolution, and, in the arcane doctrinal manoeuvres of the party and the deadly machinations of the Kremlin, Bach and the Richter brothers lost out. After an in-house “administrative trial”, they were exiled to the gulags and died there. Davidson provided indispensable assistance in Kalk’s quest, through his contacts and linguistic skills as well as simply by transporting documents between his homeland and this country.
The truth, says Davidson with conviction, will always out: “It is impossible to close the way to the truth.” He tells me the story of how even Stalin, with the vast resources at his disposal, could not entirely hide his complicity in the murder in 1934 of Politburo colleague Sergei Kirov, his main rival for the leadership. Kirov’s death was the pretext for the second huge wave of Stalinist terror, during which he used show trials, confessions and executions to wipe out the rest of the communist revolutionary elite, finally consolidating his total personal control of the state.
The long-suspected truth is that Stalin had had Kirov assassinated. To cover that up, he then had the assassins killed – and then those killers too. He erased anything that connected him to the murder. The official line was that Trotskyites had been responsible, that Stalin was grief- stricken.
Yet he was exposed by a tiny detail. When he heard of Kirov’s death, Stalin had rushed to Leningrad – his only visit to that city. Half a century later, a Russian historian picked out the salient fact from old railway records: Stalin had booked the train to Leningrad the day before Kirov’s death.
Davidson’s next book will be a look at Russian-South African contact in this century. One of the strangest episodes (and we’ll have to wait for the details) is likely to be that of the right-wing prime minister Barry Herzog sending a top-secret emissary to the Soviet Union in 1924. As Davidson says, “History is a very complicated thing.”