Empire of Liberation: Investigating Soviet Activity in Africa from Khrushchev to Gorbachev
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Africa is often treated as an inconsequential sideshow in the Cold War, with Soviet activity in Africa during this period being discussed only in a regional or sub-regional context.This reduces scholastic understanding of Soviet activity in Africa and Africa's role as a theatre in a truly global Cold War.This thesis is not just a survey of Soviet interactions with African partners, but an investigation of trends in Soviet policy towards Africa that become evident only with a wider lens.This approach places Soviet activity in a continental and global perspective.This project concerns the entire history of Soviet activity in Africa, but focuses specifically on the post-Stalin era between 1953 and 1991.While Soviet leaders hesitantly collaborated to defeat the United States and its allies in what the Soviets considered to be a zero-sum game, this project concludes there was no grand plan towards Africa.This conclusion allows for a better understanding of the trajectory of present Russian relations with African states.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".