Berbera’s Soviet legacy is reshaping a new strategic debate as Somaliland asks whether Russia could return to the former Soviet base overlooking the Gulf of Aden
By Georgy Zotov
BERBERA, Somaliland — In a weathered neighborhood on the outskirts of Berbera, the name “Moscow” still carries an unusual weight.
The two-story houses are worn by decades of heat, salt air and neglect. Some have deteriorated badly; others have been renovated. Electricity remains unreliable, although a communal generator helps keep the lights on. Satellite dishes crowd the rooftops.
Yet the neighborhood remains desirable by local standards.
When I ask how much one of the apartments might cost, my guide estimates roughly $100,000.
“Impossible,” I tell him.
He looks at me without surprise.
“What did you expect?” he replies. “This is Moscow.”
The name is a reminder of a very different Berbera — one in which Soviet engineers, doctors, military specialists and construction workers helped transform a remote Somali port into one of Moscow’s most important strategic outposts in Africa.
Almost five decades after Somalia’s ruler, Mohamed Siad Barre, broke with the Soviet Union and turned toward Washington, the physical legacy of that relationship is still visible across the city.
And some Somaliland officials now openly wonder whether Russia might return.
The neighborhood the Soviets built
The “Moscow” district was constructed during the 1970s, when Soviet involvement in Somalia was expanding rapidly.
There are competing accounts of precisely who occupied the apartments. Some local residents say Soviet military specialists and their families lived there. Somaliland officials have described the buildings as housing for port workers, while another version holds that they accommodated Somalis employed alongside Soviet personnel.
Whatever the original arrangement, residents agree on one point: the buildings were associated with the Soviet presence.
“We didn’t have buildings of this quality before,” Abdullah, a resident, tells me. “It was luxury housing. We were children and would come here simply to look at it. It seemed strange to us, as if aliens had landed.”
The Soviet presence in Berbera was not limited to housing.
By the mid-1970s, the port had become a major Soviet military facility. Naval vessels could use the harbor, while the wider installation included communications infrastructure, fuel storage and other military facilities.
Access to the former naval site is restricted today. A military presence remains in parts of the area, and visitors are warned against photographing sensitive installations.
That caution reflects how strategically important Berbera remains.
The city sits on the Gulf of Aden, close to the maritime route connecting the Indian Ocean with the Red Sea and the Suez Canal. Whoever controls or gains privileged access to Berbera possesses a valuable position along one of the world’s most consequential shipping corridors.
The Soviet Union understood that geography in the 1970s.
Russia’s interest in the region, if revived today, would be driven by many of the same strategic calculations — although the geopolitical environment has changed dramatically.
An airport built for another era
The Soviet imprint is particularly difficult to miss at Berbera’s airport.
The runway, constructed during the period of Soviet involvement, is exceptionally long by regional standards. Its scale reflected the military requirements of the Cold War rather than those of a provincial commercial airport.
After Siad Barre’s break with Moscow in 1977, the facility became associated with the American presence in Somalia. Its strategic value was obvious: Berbera offered Washington access to the Gulf of Aden and a ready-made military infrastructure on the African side of one of the world’s principal maritime chokepoints.
The airport later fell into disuse amid Somalia’s collapse.
Today, the facility has undergone major rehabilitation with support from the United Arab Emirates, reflecting yet another chapter in Berbera’s strategic history.
The pattern is striking.
Soviet engineers built the infrastructure. The United States subsequently inherited access to facilities abandoned by its former rival. Decades later, the UAE emerged as a major investor in Berbera’s port and surrounding infrastructure.
The city has repeatedly attracted outside powers because of where it sits.
“The USSR was great”
The port itself tells much the same story.
Soviet specialists constructed the modern harbor during the 1960s, and the facility became an important component of Somalia’s maritime infrastructure.
Today, merchant vessels and fishing boats still use the port.
Gebre Sefir, an Ethiopian citizen working there, points toward the ships moving through the harbor.
“The Soviet Union has been gone for decades,” he says, “but we still benefit from what it built.”
His argument is echoed by others who see the Soviet period primarily through the infrastructure it left behind.
The port has also become increasingly important to Ethiopia, a landlocked country whose access to international trade depends on corridors through neighboring states.
For Somaliland, the commercial stakes are even larger. The development of Berbera as a regional logistics hub has placed the city at the center of a contest involving Gulf investors, Ethiopia and competing international powers.
The old Soviet installations therefore sit alongside new commercial infrastructure, linking two very different eras of strategic competition.
The hospital that became a symbol
Then there is the hospital.
The facility is now associated with Somaliland’s military authorities, making photography difficult. But its origins are unmistakable to residents who remember the Soviet period.
The Soviet Union financed the project, supplied construction materials and sent specialists to work there. Soviet doctors treated patients and performed operations that were difficult to obtain elsewhere in the region.
“Before this, there was no hospital like it in Somalia,” says Barutdin Ahmed, an official with Somaliland’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
For Ahmed, the hospital is evidence of something larger than Cold War rivalry: a model of foreign assistance that produced infrastructure still used decades later.
The Soviet relationship with Somalia combined military cooperation with economic and technical assistance. Moscow provided weapons, training and loans while Soviet specialists worked on ports, airports, medical facilities and other projects.
The scale of the commitment was substantial.
For Moscow, Somalia offered a strategically valuable foothold on the Gulf of Aden. For Mogadishu, Soviet assistance offered access to military capabilities and development projects that would otherwise have been difficult to finance.
The relationship was mutually useful — until the Ogaden War shattered it.
When Siad Barre chose Washington
Siad Barre seized power in 1969 and subsequently declared a socialist course for Somalia. Soviet influence expanded rapidly, and portraits of Lenin and Marx appeared alongside the symbols of the new regime.
But ideology proved less durable than national ambition.
In 1977, Siad Barre launched an invasion of Ethiopia’s Ogaden region, hoping to incorporate territory inhabited predominantly by ethnic Somalis.
Moscow opposed the offensive.
The Soviet Union ultimately shifted its support toward Ethiopia, whose revolutionary government had also embraced socialism. Soviet advisers and military equipment poured into Ethiopia, while Cuban forces joined the Ethiopian war effort.
For Siad Barre, the reversal was intolerable.
Somalia broke relations with Moscow and expelled Soviet personnel. The facilities that had been built or developed with Soviet assistance subsequently became available to the United States.
The alliance had collapsed with extraordinary speed.
A relationship that had produced military cooperation, hospitals, housing, ports and other infrastructure was replaced by a new strategic partnership with Washington.
But the new alignment did not save Siad Barre’s government.
The price of the rupture
Somalia’s defeat in the Ogaden War weakened Siad Barre politically and militarily.
Opposition movements gained strength, and the regime responded with increasingly severe repression.
In northern Somalia, the conflict became catastrophic.
Hargeisa was devastated during the fighting of the late 1980s. Bombardment and ground operations destroyed large parts of the city and killed large numbers of civilians. Estimates of the death toll vary widely, but the destruction remains one of the defining traumas of Somaliland’s modern history.
By 1991, Siad Barre had been overthrown.
Somalia subsequently fragmented amid armed conflict and competing political authorities. Somaliland declared its independence, while other regions developed varying degrees of autonomy.
The Soviet-built infrastructure in Berbera survived the political collapse.
The political order that created it did not.
“Does Russia want to come back?”
At the port, local officials point toward the land where the Soviet naval facility once stood.
“Does Russia want to recognize our state and open a base here again?” Ahmed asks.
It is not an idle question.
Berbera’s strategic value has increased rather than diminished.
The Gulf of Aden is a gateway to the Red Sea. The nearby Bab el-Mandeb connects the maritime routes of the Indian Ocean to the Suez Canal, making the coastline strategically significant for commercial shipping and military planners alike.
The UAE has invested heavily in Berbera. Ethiopia sees the corridor as a critical route for international trade. Regional powers are increasingly attentive to the security of the Red Sea, while global powers compete for influence along its shores.
A Russian military return would therefore be far more consequential than simply reopening a Cold War-era facility.
It would place Moscow inside an intensely competitive regional environment involving the United States, China, Gulf states, Turkey, Ethiopia, Somalia and Somaliland.
For Somaliland, the appeal is equally clear. Foreign investment, security cooperation and international recognition are closely linked to its broader effort to establish itself as a sovereign state.
The Soviet legacy gives Moscow a historical advantage in the eyes of some residents.
Whether that translates into contemporary strategic influence is another question.
“Siad Barre is an American dog”
Near the central mosque in Hargeisa, I ask people what they remember about the Soviet period.
The answer is remarkably consistent.
They remember the hospital.
They remember the port.
They remember the airport.
They remember the housing.
And many say they would welcome a renewed Russian presence in Berbera if it brought investment, employment and political recognition.
Then the conversation turns to Siad Barre.
I use an Arabic expression to describe him: “kalb al-Amriki” — “American dog.”
The response is immediate.
Laughter. Then applause.
The reaction says something about the durability of historical memory in Somaliland.
For many people here, the Soviet Union is not remembered primarily as a distant superpower that disappeared in 1991. It is remembered through buildings that still stand, roads and port facilities that remain in use, a hospital that served generations of patients and an airport whose vast runway outlived the political system that created it.
The Soviet Union is gone.
The “Moscow” neighborhood remains.
And in Berbera, where new powers are again competing for access to the same strategic coastline, the question of whether Russia should return is no longer merely a relic of Cold War history.
It is part of a much larger argument about who will shape the future of the Horn of Africa.
