In 1963 the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuścinski published Black Stars (Czarne gwiazdy), a collection of reportage essays about the decolonization of Ghana and the Belgian Congo. Far from a neutral observer, Kapuścinski, like other Socialist Bloc correspondents writing about the national independence movements jolting the continent, sought to build anti-imperialist consensus in his home country. Black Stars is thus foremost a literary document of Cold War Soviet foreign policy. But what one also finds in these works of reportage, I contend, are traces of the desire on the part of certain satellite states to secure for themselves the national autonomy supported by the Soviet Union in the decolonizing world. In this article I show how Black Stars chronicles the formation of unorthodox socialist currents within the politics of Second World-Third World solidarity while otherwise in the service of the official Soviet agenda. In doing so I argue that Kapuścinski's anti-colonial reportage sheds light not only o...