[Book Review] Arrested Development: The Soviet Union in Ghana, Guinea, and Mali, 1955–1968 by Alessandro Iandolo

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, many scholars have argued that the Cold War did not simply boil down to an arms race but to a competition between two fundamentally universalist systems: socialism and capitalism. In the Third World, that competition was particularly intense, since the end of empire in Africa and revolutions in Asia and Latin America brought to the fore a new cohort of leaders who sought to achieve economic sovereignty. In the 1950s, the Soviet Union jumped on the bandwagon, offering economic assistance to a plethora of clients in the Third World. In Arrested Development, Alessandro Iandolo has written an important study of Soviet development assistance projects in Ghana, Guinea and Mali, explaining why Moscow became involved in the first place, what these projects actually entailed and why they ultimately failed.