Military assistance was crucial for the ANC, though not in a military sense. There was never any hope that the ANC could vanquish the Pretoria regime militarily, but its armed struggle was a powerful propaganda weapon that turned the ANC into a symbol of opposition to the regime. It helped to attract more cadres and win national and international support. But simultaneously it helped the ANC to spread its socialist message and its mentality of a besieged, conspiratorial but righteous organisation. 

The ANC enjoyed other forms of Soviet assistance: financial, logistical and educational, among others. Assistance to the international anti-apartheid movement and general support in the international arena were also important. But none had a greater impact both on the ANC itself and its place in South Africa's history than Soviet military aid. 

Successive apartheid governments explained Soviet attention to the South African region by the idea of "total onslaught": they believed that there was a worldwide Communist conspiracy, led by the USSR, to destroy South Africa, an outpost of European civilisation and Christianity in Africa, and grab its resources in order to weaken and destroy the West. This idea has been so thoroughly discredited that it is now mauvais ton even to mention it. Yet defeating the apartheid regime was a goal which the USSR openly proclaimed. It did everything in its power to achieve it, short of open military intervention — but the language it used was not that of the total onslaught but rather of a just struggle against racism, colonialism, imperialism and oppression. 

But, paradoxically, the Soviet Union's greatest contribution to the fall of apartheid was not its military assistance to the ANC but its change of heart about this organisation and then its own collapse. Doubts about the support for the ANC surfaced among the Soviet elite much earlier than is usually thought, in the late 1970s and particularly in the early 1980s. They were prompted by the ANC's lack of military success and by the USSR's diminishing enthusiasm about the prospects of the so-called "countries of socialist orientation" — those that proclaimed themselves "socialist" but, from the Soviet point of view, did not quite fill the bill. For it was dawning on the Soviet elite — and the Russian public — that nowhere in the Third World had "socialist orientation" been a success.

A testimony to this — and perhaps this was our most dramatic discovery-was the fact that already in the early 1980s the KGB had established direct relations with South Africa's National Intelligence Service. The Russians and Afrikaners got on well together, and sympathy with the embattled apartheid regime grew among some of the Soviet elite.

During the Gorbachev era in the late 1980s, debates about policy towards South Africa came to the fore in the Soviet Union. Not only the ANC's ability to win but even the desirability of its victory were now openly questioned in the media. Many in the Soviet Union were completely disillusioned about their own country's socialist experience, and some of those who were concerned with South Africa thought that discontinuing Soviet aid to the ANC would prevent it from coming to power, for they now assumed that the ANC, with its Soviet ideology, would destroy South Africa's economy. It was even suggested, quite openly, that establishing diplomatic relations with the apartheid government would be beneficial for Soviet interests.