Episode 60: Soviet Development Assistance to Ghana, Guinea and Mali 1955-1968 with Alessandro Iandolo

During the 1950s and 1960s, the Soviet Union began a new era of political engagement with the global south. One feature was development assistance. The Soviet Union embodied, offered and inspired an alternative approach to development, industrialization and modernization across the global south. Countries such as Ghana, Guinea and Mali in the 1950s-60s were governed by nationalists, not Marxists or Communists, and were newly independent from European imperial-colonial control.
Soviet specialists assessed the difficult conditions of these post-colonial countries as opening a path for “non-capitalist” development: state led modernization. As opposed to a Western promoted primacy of markets and individuals, “non-capitalist” development would ensure sovereignty and economic growth by shielding against French or British neo-colonial exploitation, improving living standards, empowering the state and strengthening political ties with the socialist world.
To discuss all this and more, we welcome historian Alessandro Iandolo, author of the book Arrested Development: The Soviet Union in Ghana, Guinea and Mali 1955-1968
Book description:
In Arrested Development, Alessandro Iandolo examines the USSR’s role in West Africa during the 1950s and 1960s as an aid donor, trade partner, and political model for newly independent Ghana, Guinea, and Mali.

With a strong economy in the 1950s, the USSR expanded its global outreach, supporting economic development in post-colonial Africa and Asia. Many nations saw the Soviet model as a path to political and economic independence. Drawing on extensive Russian and West African archival research, Iandolo explores Soviet ideas, sponsored projects, and their lasting impact.

Soviet specialists worked alongside West African colleagues to design ambitious development plans, build infrastructure, establish collective farms, survey mineral resources, and manage banking and trade. These collaborations—and the tensions they created—shed light on how Soviet and West African visions of development intersected. Arrested Development positions the USSR as a key player in twentieth-century economic history, reshaping global approaches to modernization.
Alessandro Iandolo is Lecturer in Soviet and Post-Soviet History at University College London.

The episode art is a 1960 poster from the Georgian SSR by Giorgi Pirtskhalava that reads: კოლონიზატორებო გაეთრიეთ! - Colonizers, get out!