In 1978, the activist and novelist Alex La Guma (19251985) published A Soviet Journey, a memoir of his travels in the Soviet Union. Today it stands as one of the longest and most substantive first-hand accounts of the USSR by an African writer. La Gumas book is consequently a rare and important document of the anti-apartheid struggle and the Cold War period, depicting the Soviet model from an African perspective and the specific meaning it held for those envisioning a future in South Africa.

For many members of the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party, the Soviet Union represented a political system that had achieved political and economic justice through socialism a point of view that has since been lost with the collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War. This new edition of A Soviet Journey intellectuals decolonization, like La Guma, looked to the Soviet Union as a paradigm of self-determination, decolonization, and postcolonial development. The introduction by Christopher J. Lee discusses these elements of La Gumas text, in addition to situating La Guma more broadly within the intercontinental spaces of the Black Atlantic and an emergent Third World.