Empire, revolution and superpower
Russia grew from the principality of Moscow into a vast empire stretching across Eurasia, ruled by tsars until the revolution of 1917 swept them away and created the world's first communist state. The Soviet Union that Lenin and then Stalin built industrialised at terrible human cost, lost some 27 million people defeating Nazi Germany, and emerged from the Second World War as one of two global superpowers locked in the Cold War with the United States.
The Soviet system collapsed in 1991, fragmenting into fifteen states and plunging Russia into a decade of chaotic capitalism and decline. Vladimir Putin, in power since 2000, rebuilt a centralised, authoritarian state, revived Russia's claim to great-power status, and pursued it by force, in Georgia, Syria and, most catastrophically, in the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 that has made Russia a pariah to much of the West.
From liberation to Wagner
Russia's African engagement is among the most consequential in this atlas, and it has changed shape entirely. During the Cold War the Soviet Union cast itself as the natural ally of anti-colonial Africa: it armed and trained liberation movements from Angola's MPLA to Mozambique's FRELIMO and the ANC in South Africa, backed Cuban troops in Angola, and educated tens of thousands of African students in Moscow, where the Peoples' Friendship University, named after Patrice Lumumba, the murdered Congolese leader Soviet propaganda made a martyr, still bears his name. For many African states, Moscow was the counterweight to their former colonisers.
The Soviet collapse ended most of that, and Russia largely withdrew from Africa in the 1990s. Its return, from the 2010s, has worn a harder face. The Wagner Group, a mercenary company tied to the Russian state, moved into the Central African Republic, Mali, Libya and Sudan, trading security for governments, and access to gold and other resources, in ways critics call a new scramble. As French forces were pushed out of the Sahel, Russian influence, arms and disinformation flowed in. Russia has also leaned on grain and fertiliser diplomacy, courting African governments even as its Ukraine blockade drove up the price of the food those same countries import.
A resource state under sanction
Russia's economy runs heavily on oil, gas, metals and grain, wealth that has cushioned it against the sweeping Western sanctions imposed after 2022 and redirected its trade towards China, India and the global south. At home, Putin's state has crushed dissent, jailed or exiled its critics, and wrapped itself in a conservative, nationalist ideology. Vast, resource-rich and heavily armed, Russia remains one of the decisive powers shaping the century, in Africa as elsewhere.