Throughout the Cold War the USSR was the most important external source of funds, ideological transfers, and organizational help for Marxists in Nigeria. The events of 1989 and the USSR’s subsequent withdrawal from this role created a major hiatus for the Nigerian Left. In this article, I prove that Nigerian socialist movements and thinkers, after a short adjustment period, successfully recovered from the shock of 1989. I present a plethora of coping mechanisms that Leftist intellectuals employed as private survival strategies. I also show that the Nigerian Left as a movement retained their Marxist and radical inspirations, and it also grew and became suffused with a new spirit of human rights, gender sensitivity, and attention to ethnicity from the 1990s onward. The Nigerian Left turned the disappearance of its external backer from a calamity into an engine of growth and ethical conscientization after 1989.