A. B. DAVIDSON, I. I. FILATOVA. RUSSIA AND SOUTH AFRICA: THREE CENTURIES OF CONNECTIONS, Moscow: Publishing House of the Higher School of Economics, 2010, 331 p.

Russian-South African contacts are not often the subject of research by scientists. The book under review, which largely makes up for the lack of attention to this area of domestic African studies , is the result of scientific research by authors who spent many years in South Africa. It is a comprehensive study of such blocks of questions as" Russians in South Africa and their ideas about it","South Africans in Russia and their ideas about our country". Interestingly, A. B. Davidson and I. I. Filatova were the first Russian scientists in South Africa, after two Russian geologists visited Pretoria in 1929 for the International Geological Congress. For a long time, there were no cultural or scientific ties between the two countries; the authors came to South Africa in 1989 (p. 9).

The monograph is based on unique archival materials, most of which are being introduced into scientific circulation for the first time and the collection of which began long before the trip to South Africa in the archives and libraries of Moscow and St. Petersburg, in the press, private archives and repositories of South Africa. The authors interviewed Russian diplomats who worked in Pretoria, descendants of Russian emigrants, children and other relatives of South Africans who once visited the USSR and left written or oral evidence of these trips.

The history of Russian-South African contacts and knowledge of the two countries about each other, as the authors point out, goes back several centuries. As early as 1652, the first governor of the Cape Colony, which, constantly growing, gave rise to the present-day Republic of South Africa, mentioned the word "Muscovy" in his diary. And in 1737, Henrik Svellengrebel, whose father was born in Moscow in 1671 and lived in Russia for most of his life, became the governor of the colony.

A. B. Davidson and I. I. Filatova describe in detail the handwritten and printed sources from which Russians, beginning in the 17th century, could get information about a distant African land. This is the translation in 1637 of the work of the Flemish Gerard Mercator "Book, glagolemaya Kosmografiya, or description of the whole world", and the first Russian printed geography in 1710, and the first map of Africa in 1713, and the translation of the German geography textbook by John Huebner in 1719. The book tells about the first Russians on the Cape of Good Hope. So, in 1763, six Russian sailors sailed to India on English ships and on the way stopped at the southern tip of Africa, and in April 1772, about seventy Russians visited there at the same time.

The work is full of absolutely amazing facts about the stay of Russians in South Africa, for example, about fugitives-exiles and residents of Kamchatka who joined them, who sailed to the African continent in 1772 directly from Bolsheretsky prison (after the uprising and the capture of the ship "St. Peter") via Mauritius and Madagascar. At the end of the 18th century, the cellist Gerasim Lebedev, whose diaries are kept in the Pushkin House in Leningrad, lived and gave concerts in the Cape Colony, and in 1872 Cape Town met the son of Tsar Alexander II, Grand Duke Alexey Alexandrovich, whom his father sent on a trip around the world to "come to his senses" after entering into a morganatic marriage with the daughter of the poet Zhukovsky. In 1897, mining engineer V. S. Reutovsky was sent "with the highest permission" to South Africa "to study the conditions of the local gold industry both in geological and technical terms" (p. 97). In other words, the foundation for the development of Russian-South African business ties was established more than 100 years ago.

The authors describe in detail the first descriptions of South Africa by the Russians: in the diaries of the famous navigators Yu. F. Lisyansky and I. F. Krusenstern (1798-1800)," Geography "of Count Kirill Razumovsky (1753), notes of V. M. Golovnin about" traveling on the sloop Diana from Kronstadt to Kamchatka "with a 13-month" respite"in South Africa, where the sloop was arrested due to the outbreak of the Anglo-Russian war, "Travel letters" from the circumnavigation of the world by the famous Russian writer I. A. Goncharov, "Pen and pencil Essays from the circumnavigation of the world in 1857, 1858, 1859, 1860" by the doctor, art critic, artist and writer A. V. Vysheslavtsov who sailed on warships simultaneously in all these qualities, etc.

A special place in the book is given to the events of the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902 and the participation of Russians in it. It is not surprising that, as Davidson and Filatova rightly point out, this war "was in the center of attention... "the civilized world", when this world met 1900 " (p. 106). After all, for the first time in it, machine guns, shrapnel and smokeless powder were used on a large scale, a loose formation of troops instead of closed columns, trenches and trenches, khaki uniforms. "The Anglo-Boer War," the authors write, "became part of the biographies of many of the most famous people of the twentieth century: Winston Churchill, Mahatma Gandhi, Field Marshal Roberts, Kitchener and Smuts, Conan Doyle and Kipling, and Alexander Ivanovich Guchkov" (p.107). Scientists have calculated the number of Russian volunteers who fought on the Boer side, and settled on the figure of 225, noting that this was only a small part of those who wanted to go to South Africa. The most famous of the volunteers: E. Y. Maksimov (later a Boer general), the Georgian Prince Nikolai Bagrationi-Mukhransky, A. I. and F. I. Guchkov (the first - chairman of the Third State Duma, leader of the Union of October 17 party, the second, his brother - one of the founders of the Union), I. I. Guchkov (the first-chairman of the Third State Duma, leader of the Union of October 17 party), K. Zabolotny - later deputy of the First State Duma, N. E. Popov, who later became a pilot. The medical detachment of the Russian Red Cross, which operated in South Africa in 1900, consisted of 6 doctors, 4 paramedics, 9 nurses, 20 orderlies and 2 "business managers" (p. 124).

This book is not the first time that the authors address the question of the reasons for Russian support for the Boers. In 1998, in South Africa, Davidson and Filatova published the book " The Russians and the Boer War "(in English). As a result of studies of documents from Russian and South African archives, supplemented by oral evidence, the main reasons for Russian participation in this war were identified on the side of the Boers: sympathy for the weaker, admiration for the republican system of the Boer states, hostility to Great Britain, deeply embedded in the minds of many strata of the population of the Russian Empire, similarities in the way of life and farmers, etc.

Not only the authors ' research interest in the participation of Russians in the Anglo-Boer War is obvious, but also their pride in their compatriots: at the old cemetery in Pretoria, they laid a wreath on the grave of the Russian naval officer Lieutenant Boris Strohlmann, who died in June 1900, and in Utrecht-on the grave of Captain Lev Pokrovsky, who died in December 1900.

The authors did not ignore the issue of Russian immigration to South Africa, mainly of the Jewish population from the western parts of the Russian Empire. For the first time in Russian African studies, the book provides quite extensive statistical data on this issue. So, in 1875, 82 emigrants from Russia lived in the Cape Colony, among them only three women, and in 1911 there were already 24,839 inhabitants born in Russia, more than half of them in the Transvaal. As Davidson and Filatova rightly argue, the mass emigration to southern Africa was "part of a violent exodus of Jews from Russia." The direct reason for it was the pogroms that swept through the lands in the "pale of settlement", where Jews were only allowed to live. In addition, the reason for the emigration of Jews at the end of the XIX century was the policy of Alexander III, during whose reign anti-Semitism grew. As a result, between the early 1880s and the outbreak of World War I, 3 million Jews left Russia: most of them for North America, and about 40,000 for South Africa (p.159).

The authors dwell in detail on the contacts between South Africa and the USSR in the years after the October Revolution: the first people from Soviet Russia appeared in southern Africa in 1919 and made pro-Bolshevik propaganda there. And in 1921, the first South African communists arrived in Moscow; the fate of many of them was tragic during the years of Stalin's repressions.

Another surprising fact is the participation of South Africans in the Russian Civil War, mainly in the ranks of the White Guard. They fought at Archangel, in the south, in the Far East, in Siberia, in Denikin's Volunteer Army... Many of them brought high military awards from Russia. And there were about 40 of them! These officers and non-commissioned officers came to Russia as part of the British troops sent by the Entente to support the White Movement.

As the authors note, South Africa was considered by Moscow to be the most promising region of the Black Continent from the point of view of possible revolutionary events. Already in the late 1920s, the Comintern placed the Communist Party of South Africa (CPUSA), established in 1921, under constant control, which was expressed in numerous letters of instruction, interference in the internal party struggle in the CPUSA, and the creation of Comintern commissions to analyze the situation in the party. Some South African communists visited Russia, where they received training, for example, at the Communist University of the Workers of the East (KUTV), and instruction. KUTV actually ceased to exist in 1937, and in 1938 it was officially closed. Even earlier, by the beginning of 1937, most of the employees of the African direction were expelled, arrested or shot. Contacts between the CPSU and the CPSU, despite the participation of South Africans in the Second World War on the side of the anti - Hitler coalition, for many years practically came to naught, and only in 1959-1960, when the Middle East sector of the international department of the CPSU Central Committee was assigned to deal with Africa, did the restoration of direct party ties begin.

A special section of the book is dedicated to introducing South African literature to Russians and Russian literature to South Africans. Already in 1873, the St. Petersburg magazine Znanie published Fables and Tales of Wild Peoples, all of them South African. The first South African writer that Russia met back in the late 19th century was Olivia Schreiner, the author of novels about the life of Boer farmers. Since the late 1950s, hundreds of South African novels, short stories, and poems have been published in Russian- by Alex La Guma, Nadine Gordimer, Eizekeile Mpahlele, Richard Reeve, and others. Interestingly, South African literature was published in Russia in immeasurably larger circulations than in South Africa itself. Most of all, "literature of protest" was translated. Since the late 1980s and early 1990s, the flow of remittances has declined: the cold War has ended, the geopolitical confrontation between the socialist camp and the West has become a thing of the past, and Africa has ceased to be a field of fierce struggle between two social systems. This has also affected the cultural sphere. And later, when Russia established diplomatic and business relations with South Africa, when the exchange of tourists, theater productions, and cultural programs began to increase, literature ceased to be the main source of information.

In turn, although Russian literature was not widely distributed in South Africa, there were some opportunities to get acquainted with it. So, Chekhov's "The Seagull" from 1931 to 1985 was staged 9 times, "The Cherry Orchard" from 1934 to 1979-7 times, "Uncle Vanya" - from 1963 to 1985-3 times. "Three Sisters"was also popular.

According to the authors of the book, they did not claim a philosophical and theoretical approach, the creation of their own concepts. Their task was to collect information that had hitherto been little touched by the "hand of the historian." Indeed, the book gives a complete picture of the complex paths that led from one end of the earth to the other, what images emerged from this information and how they changed over the centuries. The paper convincingly describes what influenced the formation of the image of South Africa in Russia and Russia in the South of the continent, and the evolution of relations between the two countries. This is the role of South Africa as a "sea tavern" on the way from Europe to the East, and the role of immigrants from Europe in Africa, and the events of the Boer War, and the activities of the Comintern... The book, of course, makes a significant contribution to the mutual understanding of the peoples of Russia and South Africa and to Russian African studies.

Permanent link to this publication: