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Among the unanswered—and perhaps unanswerable—questions regarding the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan is the extent to which the conflict contributed to the USSR’s dissolution less than three years after the withdrawal of Moscow’s forces. Proponents of the view that the war had precipitated the Soviet collapse included CIA analysts like Anthony Arnold, who argued in A Fateful Pebble that the war, while not solely responsible for the Soviet collapse, had pushed the contradictions of the Soviet economy, inter-ethnic relations, and military-industrial complex to their limits.[1] More skeptical voices (including my own) have generally argued that the war’s reverberations within the USSR certainly led to domestic unrest, it was hardly the main mobilizing issue for any of the groups trying radically reform the system or hasten its end.[2] Crucially, this held even for the nascent Islamist movement in Central Asia, precisely the sort of people whom Arnold and his CIA colleagues had counted on to mount a resistance to Moscow’s rule.
H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum
Roundtable Review 15-4
Yaacov Ro’i. The Bleeding Wound: The Soviet War in Afghanistan and the Collapse of the Soviet System. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2022. ISBN: 9781503628748
18 September 2023 | PDF: https://issforum.org/to/jrt15-4 | Website: rjissf.org
Editor: Diane Labrosse
Commissioning Editor: Thomas Maddux
Production Editor: Christopher Ball
Copy Editor: Bethany Keenan
Contents
Introduction by Artemy M. Kalinovsky, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA. 2
Review by Alessandro Iandolo, University College London. 6
Review by Sarah Mendelson, Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College in DC. 9
Review by Robert Rakove, Stanford University. 13
Review by Ronald Grigor Suny, University of Michigan, University of Chicago, emeritus. 17
Response by Yaacov Ro’i, Tel Aviv University. 24
Introduction by Artemy M. Kalinovsky, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA
Among the unanswered—and perhaps unanswerable—questions regarding the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan is the extent to which the conflict contributed to the USSR’s dissolution less than three years after the withdrawal of Moscow’s forces. Proponents of the view that the war had precipitated the Soviet collapse included CIA analysts like Anthony Arnold, who argued in A Fateful Pebble that the war, while not solely responsible for the Soviet collapse, had pushed the contradictions of the Soviet economy, inter-ethnic relations, and military-industrial complex to their limits.[1] More skeptical voices (including my own) have generally argued that the war’s reverberations within the USSR certainly led to domestic unrest, it was hardly the main mobilizing issue for any of the groups trying radically reform the system or hasten its end.[2] Crucially, this held even for the nascent Islamist movement in Central Asia, precisely the sort of people whom Arnold and his CIA colleagues had counted on to mount a resistance to Moscow’s rule.
But the Soviet collapse, whatever its many causes, has also made it difficult to evaluate the effects of the war, as the fate of veterans and the memory of the war have taken different routes in the fifteen successor states, and as the tumultuous transformations of the 1990s put the war in the rearview mirror. America’s intervention in Vietnam sparked an anti-war movement and the rise of the New Left, but many of the social and cultural reverberations of the US defeat in Vietnam were only fully felt in America in the 1980s. The now-classic works about the war, including Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country (1986), Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (1990), and even Hollywood fare like Apocalypse Now (1979), Rambo: First Blood (1982), and Full Metal Jacket (1987), [3]came years after the notorious scenes at the US embassy in Saigon in April 1975. The Vietnam War’s effects on American policy became, understandably, an obsession of historians and social scientists in those decades.
The USSR expired four months before the final defeat of the regime it had supported. Few novelists or filmmakers wanted to think about the war; few sociologists were interested in studying how the war affected veterans, their families, or society at large.[4] Indeed, once the Soviet Union had ceased to exist, it was unclear what the object of such a study would even be.
Yaacov Ro’i was one of the few scholars who tried to do this while memories of the war were still fresh. In 1992 and 1993, Ro’i and a team of assistants carried out a series of surveys and interviews with veterans across a number of former Soviet republics. The book returns to the materials Ro’i collected then, but he analyzes this material against a careful reading of the scholarship on the war that has emerged over three decades.[5] Bleeding Wound shows that whether or not the war precipitated the end of the USSR, it created deep rifts in Soviet society that would have been difficult to heal even if the country had not come apart in December 1991.
All of the reviewers in this roundtable are impressed by the monumental effort of the book. Alessandro Iandolo highlights the “ ‘quality’ of the material” Ro’i collected, noting how the “passages from a small number of in-depth interviews color the book with harrowing descriptions of the soldier’s fear of going to war, the abysmal conditions in which they operated in Afghanistan, the guilt (or cold-hearted detachment) with which they remembered the atrocities inflicted on the Afghan population, and their sense of anger and frustration toward the Soviet society once they returned home.” Finally, he notes, “The Bleeding Wound is a harrowing reminder of what warfare really is.”
In his review, Rob Rakove similarly praises The Bleeding Wound as a “triumph of multi-decade research” and notes that “Ro’i buttresses his extensive research within English and Russian-language literature on the Soviet-Afghan War by hundreds of survey interviews with surviving veterans of the war (afgantsy), as well as others shaped by the conflict.” But he also notes that “oral history research constitutes this survey’s most impressive contribution – but far from its only one.” Rakove is particularly appreciative of the way that Ro’i allows the dissonance among his respondents to come through: “Ro’i is to be commended for presenting his data, warts and all, rather than artificially smoothing over discordant points to reach easy, stylized conclusions.”
Ronald Suny, in an appreciative but somewhat more critical review, distills the debates about the Soviet collapse and the place of the war within that discussion before noting that Ro’i “enters the fray with a fascinating, detailed, but somewhat rambling study.” Like Rakove, Suny approves of the way that “Ro’i is scrupulous in recording the variety of opinions and attitudes, many of them contradictory, toward the war and those who fought in it, who are known as afgantsy.”
Sarah Mendelson is more critical of Ro’i’s methodology, noting that “the surveys are too small to generate statistically robust findings, and the participants were not randomly generated.” She also wonders why a section on the impact of Islam on troops “did not focus more on those from Chechnya, Ingushetia, and Dagestan.” (In his response, Ro’i cites the far higher number of Soviet troops from Central Asia, though one suspects that it would have been particularly difficult to do research in the North Caucasus in the early- to mid-1990s.) Still, Mendelson notes that despite the methodological issues, “this book belongs alongside the many other important and well-researched books on the war in Afghanistan that inform our understanding of the last decade of the Soviet Union.”
All of the reviewers note the way that the book, while not written in a comparative frame, evokes comparisons with other wars of counterinsurgency. Comparisons between the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and the US war in Vietnam are not new, but Rakove points at the deeper comparative work that is still to be carried out when he notes that “The Bleeding Wound invokes comparison to a classic study of US soldiers in the Vietnam War, Christian Appy’s Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam.”[6]
All of the reviewers note the timeliness of the book in light of Russia’s intervention in Ukraine. Rakove highlights the importance of rehabilitating the war in Russian memory and the justification for the full scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022: “Victory eludes [Putin] in Ukraine, but his efforts to rehabilitate the earlier war appear to have been more successful.” Mendelson notes that “many issues that jump off the page because of their contemporary relevance,” among them the intelligence failures prior to intervention, failure to engage experts, and misreading the resolve of the population being invaded. “These observations,” she observes, “cause not only horror and sadness but incredulity.”
In his response, Yaakov Ro’i addresses some of the issues raised about the methodology, and lays out how he sees the comparison between the Soviet war in Afghanistan and Russia’s ongoing attempt to subjugate Ukraine. Despite the many differences between these two wars, Ro’i points out that there are many familiar echoes. One cannot but agree with his statement that “the Russo-Ukrainian war has brought out once more the fact that while it may be relatively easy to decide on initiating a war … once it is underway it tends to get out of hand and progress in ways not contemplated by its progenitors.” Of course, this observation is not limited to the Soviet war in Afghanistan or Russia’s in Ukraine, but could be easily applied to the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and many more conflicts besides.
Indeed, one comes way from accounts like Bleeding Wound hoping that people—leaders of great powers, in particular—learn the right lessons. Experience suggests otherwise.
Participants:
Yaacov Ro’i is Professor of History emeritus at the Cummings Center for Russian and East European Studies at Tel Aviv University. He has written and edited a number of books and authored numerous articles and chapters in books on various aspects of Soviet foreign and domestic policy – on Islam in the Soviet Union, on the Central Asian Soviet republics, on Soviet Jewry and Soviet policy in the Middle East, particularly toward Israel.
Artemy Kalinovsky is Professor of Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet Studies at Temple University and the Principal Investigator of an European Research Council (ERC) funded project, based at the University of Amsterdam, which investigates the legacies of socialist development in contemporary Central Asia in order to examine entanglements between socialist and capitalist development approaches in the late twentieth century. He earned his BA from the George Washington University and his MA and PhD from the London School of Economics. His first book was A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Harvard University Press, 2011). His second book, Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan (Cornell University Press, 2018), won the Davis and Hewett prizes from the Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.
Alessandro Iandolo is Lecturer in Soviet and Post-Soviet History at University College London. His first book, Arrested Development: The Soviet Union in Ghana, Guinea, and Mali, 1955-1968, was published by Cornell University Press in 2022.
Sarah E. Mendelson currently serves as the head of Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College in DC and as a Distinguished Service Professor of Public Policy. She served in the Obama administration including as the US ambassador to the UN’s Economic and Social Council. She is the author of Changing Course: Ideas, Politics, and the Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Princeton University Press, 1998) as well articles that draw on large N, random-sample surveys conducted in Russia on knowledge, attitudes, and experience of various human rights abuses which have appeared in numerous journals including Political Science Quarterly, Law and Society Review, and Post-Soviet Affairs. Her current work centers on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) including an edited volume on using the SDGs to teach and research human rights, due out in 2024.
Robert Rakove is a lecturer in International Relations at Stanford University. He is the author of Kennedy, Johnson, and the Nonaligned World, published in 2012 by Cambridge University Press, and Days of Opportunity: The United States and Afghanistan before the Soviet Invasion, which was published by Columbia University Press in 2023.
Ronald Grigor Suny is William H. Sewell, Jr. Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, and Emeritus Professor of Political Science and History at the University of Chicago. He was the first holder of the Alex Manoogian Chair in Modern Armenian History at the University of Michigan, where he founded and directed the Armenian Studies Program. He is author of The Baku Commune: Class and Nationality in the Russian Revolution; The Making of the Georgian Nation; Looking Toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History; The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union; The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the Soviet Union and the Successor States; “They Can Live in the Desert But Nowhere Else”: A History of the Armenian Genocide; Red Flag Unfurled: History, Historians, and the Russian Revolution; Red Flag Wounded: Stalinism and the Fate of the Soviet Experiment; Stalin: Passage to Revolution: and co-author with Valerie Kivelson of Russia’s Empires. He is currently working on a book on the history of the nation-form and the recent upsurge of exclusivist nationalisms and authoritarian populisms: Forging the Nation: The Making and Faking of Nationalisms.
Review by Alessandro Iandolo, University College London
The Soviet war in Afghanistan has generated considerable interest among historians since at least some records became available in multiple former republics of the USSR. Artemy Kalinovsky forged a new path forward with his sophisticated study of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. Timothy Nunan examined the humanitarian and developmental dimension of the conflict. More recently, Elisabeth Leake produced a complete overview of the politics, strategy, and diplomacy of the war in Afghanistan, combining global and regional perspectives.[7]
In The Bleeding Wound, Yaacov Ro’i has a different goal. The book is one of the most complete accounts of the Soviet war in Afghanistan and its devastating consequences on Soviet society. The Bleeding Wound focuses not so much on the military campaign, which is covered in the first two chapters, but more on the effects that a decade of lies, violence, and incompetence at all levels had on Soviet soldiers, their families, and their relationship with the state in which they lived. Ro’i’s overarching argument is that the war in Afghanistan caused such a deep laceration in the fabric of Soviet society that the eventual demise of the USSR was inevitable.
The Bleeding Wound is “encyclopedic” (as Karen Petrone describes it in an endorsement for the book) in its treatment of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. It opens with a discussion of the Soviet government’s reasons for intervening in Afghanistan in December 1979; it then moves on to examine the course of the military operations until the withdrawal of Soviet forces in February 1989; the composition, structure, and operational history of the Fortieth Army (the military force that was created for the war in Afghanistan); and the evolution of the approach of the Soviet leadership to the conflict. All these chapters are based on a precise and exhaustive reading of Soviet government documents, journalistic accounts of the war, and English- and Russian-language secondary sources. This relatively compact overview of both the high politics of the war and the “everyday life” of Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan does not aim to push scholarship forward, but it represents an effective introduction to the topic and offers a great resource for classroom use.
The second half of the book investigates how the Soviet media reported on the war, the shifts in public opinion, the plight of Afghan veterans, the impact of the war on Soviet Central Asia, and the effects of the conflict in Afghanistan on the dissolution of the USSR. In these chapters, Ro’i integrates accounts from other authors and from the Soviet press with a series of interviews with Afghan veterans that he and his research assistants conducted first in 1992-1993, and then in the 2010s. The sample is large enough to allow Ro’i to draw some conclusions based on quantity, especially when discussing the soldiers’ attitude to the conflict and their feelings once they were demobilized. However, it is often the “quality” of the material that shines through the text. Passages from a smaller number of in-depth interviews color the book with harrowing descriptions of the soldiers’ fear of going to war, the abysmal conditions in which they operated in Afghanistan, the guilt (or cold-hearted detachment) with which they remembered the atrocities inflicted on the Afghan population, and their sense of anger and frustration toward Soviet society once they returned home.
Here, two very different books on the Soviet war in Afghanistan loom large in comparison with The Bleeding Wound. One is Mark Galeotti’s Afghanistan: The Soviet Union’s Last War; the other is Svetlana Alexevich’s Zinky Boys.[8] Galeotti primarily focuses on the military aspects of the conflict, with some insightful discussion of the effects of the war on Soviet society. Building on his work, Ro’i offers a more systematic and comprehensive assessment of the “wounds” Afghanistan opened in the Soviet body politic. Alexevich’s interviews with veterans of the war in Afghanistan aimed to show the horror and hollowness of the Soviet system, and Ro’i frequently quotes from Zinky Boys. The Bleeding Wound’s more anodyne, almost scientific, tone delivers no less of a punch than Alexevich’s more lyrical register. Data and numbers capture the brutality and shocking violence of the war in Afghanistan just as effectively.
Ro’i’s data are also very effective at rendering the shifting attitudes of the Soviet public toward the conflict. During the first few years of the war, most draft-age young men—and their families—dreaded the prospect of their being sent to Afghanistan. The authorities’ insistence that Soviet troops were not involved in active combat in Afghanistan rang more and more hollow as the war dragged on. Moreover, everyone was conscious of dedovschchina—the violent hazing of young soldiers by more experienced ones (called “grandfathers”). Nonetheless, the Soviet public, including the draftees, by and large accepted the idea that the intervention in Afghanistan was justifiable to secure the Soviet Union’s southern border and to prevent the installation of American or Chinese military bases, as the government maintained.
Later, as the reality of the war became obvious to the soldiers who served in Afghanistan and to the grieving families of those who returned in zinc coffins, attitudes changed. Fear turned into anger at a government that sent hundreds of thousands of young people to fight a war they did not understand. Moreover, the children of the political and bureaucratic elites, who had better resources and wider networks, could dodge the draft much more easily than farmers and industrial workers. It was the most vulnerable part of Soviet society that bore the brunt of the war in Afghanistan.
By the time Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985, the prevalent attitude toward the war was a mix of cynical apathy and heated resentment toward the Soviet system. Gorbachev used it to initiate the withdrawal of Soviet forces, overcoming the skepticism of some of his advisers by pointing at public opinion. Ro’i does not lionize Gorbachev, though. His government ended the war but abandoned most afgantsy (as Soviet veterans of the war in Afghanistan became known) to their destiny. Physically and psychologically damaged by the war, the veterans returned home to a Soviet Union that was changing more rapidly than they could understand. As perestroika replaced the old slogan of “internationalist duty” with the search for profit, the afgantsy despised the rampant materialism around them and struggled to find gainful employment. Violence remained part of their lives. Many survived by joining security forces and criminal gangs. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, veterans from Afghanistan repressed popular uprisings in the Caucasus and the Baltics, enforced vigilante justice on the streets in Moscow, stood on both sides of the barricades during the 1991 attempted coup, and eventually ended up fighting in Chechnya.
The final chapter in the book contains the kernel of Ro’i’s argument. The extent to which the war in Afghanistan determined the actual dissolution of the Soviet Union is debatable. However, there is no doubt that the traumas of the war created a deep divide between different elements of Soviet society. The political leadership appeared hapless at best, and utterly corrupt at worst. The Soviet armed forces—eulogized in official rhetoric for over thirty years—lost most of their prestige. Former soldiers scorned the greed they saw around them, and many Soviet citizens reviled the afgantsy as violent thugs. Retaining any form of trust in the Soviet system became much more difficult after the war in Afghanistan.
Despite its many limitations, Gorbachev’s glasnost allowed for a relatively frank discussion of the war and its legacy. As Ro’i shows, between 1989 and 1991, the war in Afghanistan was analyzed at all levels of society—from the supreme Soviet to local committees, and by the military as well as common citizens around the USSR (279-290). While some remained convinced that the intervention was necessary and that the conduct of the Fortieth Army was beyond reproach, others conceded that the Soviet armed forces had committed countless atrocities against the very Afghan civilians they were allegedly defending. In Afghanistan, the Soviet journalist Artem Borovik concluded , “we bombed not only the detachments of rebels and their caravans, but our own ideals as well” (290).
The Bleeding Wound is not an easy read. While the book does not revel in gory anecdotes and eschews military technicalities, it presents a chillingly accurate and sharp overview of the horrors of war: a brutalized population in Afghanistan, thousands of traumatized combatants, and thousands of bereaved families on all sides. Besides being a fascinating work of scholarship, The Bleeding Wound is also a harrowing reminder of what warfare really is.
Review by Sarah Mendelson, Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College in DC
Overall, Yaacov Ro’i’s voluminous The Bleeding Wound: The Soviet War in Afghanistan and the Collapse of the Soviet System confirms much of what we know about how the Soviet decision to intervene in Afghanistan was made—by a small number of leaders—and how the decision to withdraw was finally realized—it was propelled by a number of policies, most importantly domestic ones, that were driven by the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. Unlike many other books on the subject, Ro’i’s spends much more time on those who served in the war, the conditions under which they served, and what they encountered if and when they returned home.[9]
The phrase “bleeding wound” (110) to describe the war in Afghanistan, which Gorbachev dropped not at all casually in 1986, was for many among the first indications that the war had entered a new phase and that a change in foreign policy was emerging inside the Soviet Union. Indeed, those changes, many of which are detailed in this book, as well as others, enabled and created the demand for the ultimate withdrawal from Afghanistan.[10]
A central question preoccupying the book is the relationship between the war and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Ro’i does not find definitive proof that the two are related, but his narrative assigns much causal importance to the two events. While certainly the withdrawal was a critical foreign policy pivot driven by Gorbachev’s domestic concerns, it was the combination of glasnost, perestroika, and the relaxing of policies toward the republics that ultimately brought about the collapse.[11] The cratering of gas and oil prices no doubt also played roles. In fact, to read Catherine Belton’s Putin’s People, it would seem that some in the KGB and in the Party leadership anticipated the collapse well before the withdrawal from Afghanistan and busily stashed or hoarded hard currency abroad.[12]
In many ways, this book is two in one. There is the big-picture political and bureaucratic contexts for the intervention and withdrawal decisions noted above, and there is also a lot of attention on the Soviet troops that fought in Afghanistan. Ro’i accomplishes this through an extensive focus on the afgantsy, (the Soviets that served in Afghanistan as they were called), his survey work (more on that below), and an examination of Central Asian troops, which resulted in fewer revelations perhaps than the space warranted. Ro’i finds that Central Asian troops were not especially motivated by religion and not prone to being disloyal. That left me wondering why, if the purpose of this section is to explore the impact of Islam on the troops, it did not focus more on those from Chechnya, Ingushetia, and Dagestan (271).
Reading The Bleeding Wound against the backdrop of the current Russian war in Ukraine, I was struck by numerous parallels between the Soviet war in Afghanistan and what we see every day in accounts of the war in Ukraine. These observations cause not only horror and sadness but incredulity.
Let me detail just a few of the many issues that jump off the page because of their contemporary relevance.[13] The intelligence failures prior to the intervention in Afghanistan, the not knowing the ‘enemy,’ and not engaging experts all echo eerily: Ro’i notes in numerous places the way in which the Soviet leadership misread the resolve of the Afghans (289). This tracks closely to the fact that the ultimate decision to intervene was, in the case of Afghanistan, made by a small circle of decision makers (14). Compared to President Vladimir Putin’s sole decision-making, the Politburo’s narrow band is rather expansive.
Then there is the way that the Afghan war is described, or rather not described, by state media. The censorship, the hidden or secret nature of the war (103), and the absence of the word ‘war’ in coverage are all stunningly familiar (20, 23). For years, the Soviet war in Afghanistan was referenced as a “limited contingent” (56) versus today’s “special military operation” in Ukraine. For years, the Kremlin required reporting about the war that vastly diverged from reality (35).
Or compare and contrast the scale of the wars. Here too, in both cases, the number of casualties are hidden (280). For all the focus the Soviet war in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989 has received from scholars, it is sobering to consider that certainly there have been far more Russian troops injured or killed in the first eleven months of today’s war in Ukraine than in the entire ten years of the war in Afghanistan.[14] Soviet troops numbered between 85,000 and 100,000 in any given year (57), with an estimated 15,000 to 19,000 (89, 90) killed and 54,000 wounded (although there is some overlap with those who died, [90]). When one considers that those numbers drew on the whole of the Soviet Union (although Ro’i makes the point [5] that recruitment was not evenly distributed), it suggests that the Russian war in Ukraine is likely to affect a far larger number of individuals and families with upwards of 150,000 initially serving and 300,000 who were recruited in fall 2022. The US and allies put estimates of contemporary Russian troop injuries and deaths at or near 200,000.[15] Where these draftees are recruited from, or dragooned, also seems familiar. In the Afghan war, Ro’i notes that the vast majority of draftees came from lower socioeconomic groups and rural areas (72). The military operations in Afghanistan involved chaos, poor or minimal training, and bad logistics (29). Soldiers reported not knowing they were being deployed or only being informed immediately before they were sent to Afghanistan (76-77; 206). Also tragically similar are the enormous numbers of civilians killed (upwards of 1 million) and the 5.5 million refugees created by the war in Afghanistan (38). The killing of civilians ultimately proved lethal for the Soviets forces; it alienated local populations and caused defeat (52). The command structure, then as now, was one where field operators could not make decisions on their own (39).
Finally, even the official reason for the war itself is familiar: a “serious danger to the security of the Soviet state…on our southern border…” (100). Substitute “Russia” for “Soviet” and “western” for “southern,” and you have another war again allegedly against the United States. The quotations above are from Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev in 1980, not Putin in 2022. Perhaps the most profound lesson from Afghanistan is the most tragic today: do not use the military beyond the country’s borders (131).
On occasion, Ro’i uses words and terms that were once mainstream in the old school of Sovietology but that in 2023 are jarring, and to this reader, not only out of date but imprecise. When he speaks of “ethnic unrest” (3; 306), “nationalists” (289), “nationalism” (298), or the “center and periphery” (304), he is in fact referencing people and states that were imprisoned, exiled, annihilated, and otherwise occupied by the Soviet system. Why still talk of ethnicity, nationalism, or the periphery, especially given that several are or aspire to be members of the European Union and NATO—and are thus not so peripheral to Russian interests? The dynamic in these places—then and now—encompassed far more than ethnicity; instead, it was about the demand for freedom, democratic governance, and yes, national security. The view from Moscow continues to cloud the analysis. The use of these old terms still distracts from the main action: the reforms that Gorbachev launched stoked the already existing movements in captive states to break free. It was those dynamics—more than the war in Afghanistan—that drove the collapse of the Soviet Union. The union, as it were, could only be held together by force. Once force was relaxed, the system collapsed. It is those dynamics which Putin is today fighting in Ukraine.
Ro’i contends that the most invaluable sources for this book are the three “surveys” he conducted. I disagree. The book is steeped in the literature on the war, and he makes robust use of his vast knowledge. These surveys, however, are too small to generate statistically robust findings, and the participants were not randomly generated. In the early 1990s, he interviewed 221 veterans of the war in a number of post-Soviet states using a snowball sampling method (where veterans are asked to identify other potential veterans to be interviewed); 229 interviews with the general public across eleven former Soviet states (which he acknowledges are not a representative sample); and 266 emigres from the Soviet Union to Israel (6). Asking “your view of our moral right to intervene militarily in Afghanistan,” he divides the 221 afgantsy into four categories—“Russians, Other Slavs, Central Asians, Other Muslims”—without indicating how many are in each group (173) and does the same for the general population, asking “Did the method and form of the introduction of our troops in Afghanistan strengthen the USSR’s international prestige?” (199). What do the responses suggest? Even if the four categories were evenly divided, we are talking about somewhere between 50 and 60 individuals. To be able to make statistically robust statements, he would have needed closer to 500 from each group generated through a randomized process. The presentation of the results are often confusing. Consider this statement based on the interviews with the 266 emigres: “Our survey of Soviet immigrants to Israel in the early to mid-1990s demonstrated that a majority of Soviet citizens…read vets’ speeches and stories…” (185).
Notwithstanding the methodological issues, this book belongs alongside the many other important and well-researched books on the war in Afghanistan that inform our understanding of the last decade of the Soviet Union. Was the war “a key episode” (279) leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union? I am still not convinced and put more emphasis on other policy changes. The fact that the lessons from that earlier war have had virtually no impact on today’s war of aggression, however, causes one to wonder what will be the impact on Russia and Russians? It may well be, as it was during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, that time is not on Russia’s side (to directly contradict an op-ed by two former US secretaries of state and defense).[16] Perhaps even more of a parable for Russia (and the world) is Ro’i’s observation that “…concealing the war’s true nature had morally deformed both the army and society” (158). That does not bode well for anyone.
Review by Robert Rakove, Stanford University
It all seems so familiar. An ill-conceived military intervention, framed on risible premises, is undertaken by a cloistered Kremlin leadership in the throes of a siege mentality. Confused soldiers are hurriedly dispatched into a lethal battleground with outdated equipment, inadequate training, and myopic instructions. Their superiors contend with political mismanagement and a convoluted chain of command. Inevitably, as local resistance defies predictions of a quick, surgical action, Moscow’s ill-treated soldiers brutalize the civilian population, to the profound detriment of the Kremlin’s global standing.
Yaacov Ro’i’s The Bleeding Wound, is of course, an exhaustive depiction of the Soviet war in Afghanistan and its myriad consequences for the Communist superpower. It entered print in March 2022, weeks after the commencement of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Undoubtedly, I will not be the sole reviewer to note the unsettling parallels between these two wars, separated by four decades.
Yet it would be reductive to discuss the book solely in light of the present calamity, thus flattening out the differences between the wars and the governments that waged them. The Bleeding Wound is a triumph of multi-decade research. Ro’i buttresses his extensive research within English and Russian-language literature on the Soviet-Afghan War by hundreds of survey interviews with surviving veterans of the war (afgantsy), as well as others shaped by the conflict, some conducted in the early 1980s. Oral history research constitutes this survey’s most impressive contribution—but far from its only one.
Ro’i’s first two chapters cover familiar ground: the calamitous decision of the Brezhnev Politburo to intervene in Afghanistan. His explanation for the decision does not depart significantly from that of his peers, but his subsequent discussion elucidates the pervasive role of misperception—perhaps of conscious mendacity—within Moscow’s subsequent efforts to explain its involvement.[17] KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov repeatedly claimed that the intervention only narrowly prevented the United States from developing new intelligence or military facilities in Afghanistan to replace those it had just forfeited within revolutionary Iran (100). This rationale trickled down to the operational level, where deploying Soviet soldiers were informed that their predecessors had just narrowly preceded the Green Berets (208).
Did Andropov actually believe this? As Ro’i argues, the chairman actively manipulated his ailing boss, but was he consciously lying? Furthermore—setting aside the manifest implausibility of Washington establishing new facilities in Afghanistan—one might observe that the Soviet Union had lived with US surveillance along its southern border for decades. The hypothetical substitution of new Afghan facilities for shuttered Iranian ones could hardly occur overnight. Such a development would have been vexing, but would it have been worse than the previously tolerated status quo? Without questioning the power of this argument in the feverish Politburo debate, I would still observe that there is something odd about it.[18]
The heart of the book, however, delivers a comprehensive analysis of the myriad effects of the Afghan war on Soviet society. Here, Ro’i’s analysis builds expansively upon the valuable, pioneering work of Mark Galeotti, among others.[19] The passage of time and extensive additional research often allows Ro’i to reach richer conclusions. One reads, for example, of the inability of late Soviet society to grapple with the symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) among returning afgantsy. Soviet psychologists struggled to treat soldiers; by one American doctor’s account, they only learned of the diagnosis in 1988 (244-5).[20] Another highly effective section describes the struggles of Soviet medicine to treat soldiers wounded on the battlefield, and those stricken by disease (69-72).
In this and other facets, The Bleeding Wound invokes comparison to a classic study of US soldiers in the Vietnam War, Christian Appy’s Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam.[21] Appy’s title could easily be transplanted: like their US counterparts, the combatants of the 40th Army came primarily from villages, towns, and the blue-collar workforce (72-3). Ethnicity also offers an intriguing lens, and something of a parallel to the American experience in Vietnam. As originally marshaled, the Soviet detachment was entirely manned by conscripts from Central Asia. That proportion thinned over time, as Russians, Ukrainians, and others entered service. Both superpowers, consequently, contended with internal discord among their detachments, although the extent of inter-ethnic infighting within the 40th Army is difficult to discern beyond anecdotal discussion and survey responses.
In this, Ro’i is to be commended for presenting his data, warts and all, rather than artificially smoothing over discordant points to reach easy, stylized conclusions. His analysis at least suggests a gradual waning of veterans’ belief in the war’s justification, as rationales for the war frayed and public criticism of it intensified.
Service in Afghanistan drove a deep, lasting wedge between Soviet soldiers and the society they believed themselves to be defending. Some felt wrongly condemned for crimes committed in Afghanistan—even as they might themselves admit to the murder of civilians.[22] Others perceived not so much condemnation as indifference.[23] Soldiers returned from Afghanistan singly, at times arduously, to a society that was unprepared to welcome them. Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika programs struck many of them as a general repudiation. More specifically, the Soviet state fell far short of its promises to employ, educate, house, and otherwise care for them, well before its disintegration.
Recognition of the grievous error committed by the Brezhnev Politburo and perpetuated under his successors forced a fundamental reckoning with the nature of the Soviet system. In hurriedly stitching together a bizarre rationale for its intervention, stifling serious discussion of the war for years, and neglecting its veterans, the Soviet leadership opened up a yawning credibility gap—easily matching the one besetting its superpower rival in the 1960s and 1970s. While the aftereffects of the Vietnam War staggered the United States for the remainder of the Cold War, its Soviet rival appears to have sustained graver damage from its Afghan venture.
Here, Ro’i strikes a careful balance. By itself, the Afghanistan war did not constitute the principal cause of the Soviet collapse (and weighing the respective factors is clearly the task for another book). Clearly, however, it acted as an accelerant, further fraying the already tattered credibility of the state (305). Disaffected veterans played a crucial role in late and post-Soviet conflicts: in violent police actions in the Baltic States, in ethnic conflict in the Caucasus and Central Asia, and even in the abortive August 1991 coup against Gorbachev. Ro’i’s discussion of domestic militarization mirrors that of another important contribution to the US Vietnam War historiography: Kathleen Belew’s Bring the War Home.[24]
Occasionally, one wishes that the book could have extended its conclusions a bit further (setting aside questions of timing). A brief chapter on the war’s effects on the Soviet/Russian military notes some adaptation, but also the failure to learn broad lessons before the onset of the first war in Chechnya (1994-1996). The post-Soviet evolution of films and other media about the war would also worth exploring, if perhaps falling outside the scope of the book.
Paragraphs or even single sentences of The Bleeding Wound suggest possible monograph topics: Soviet/post-Soviet responses to PTSD; the socioeconomic effects of the war on the Central Asian republics; and the roles of women. The Bleeding Wound is invaluable in its breadth and insight, even as current circumstances render further studies uncertain. Ro’i’s brief, intriguing discussion of the possible use of chemical weapons by the Soviets is unlikely to be confirmed via Moscow-area research in the immediate future (36). Nor is a systematic study of atrocities committed by the 40th Army against Afghan civilians—but remarkable quotations found throughout The Bleeding Wound attest to their ubiquity.
Russia’s current authoritarian is presently intent on repeating the mistakes of his doddering Brezhnev-era predecessors, while adding some of his own invention. Victory eludes him in Ukraine, but his efforts to rehabilitate the earlier war appear to have been more successful. “It wasn’t a war, it was a military action,” one veteran declared in 2019.[25] Among the afgantsy is General Sergei Surovikin, the apparent architect of Russia’s campaign against Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure.[26]
The task of grappling with failed, unjustified wars is exceptionally difficult for any society. None of the above is to idealize the halting, stymied American process of coming to terms with its own Cold War-era counterinsurgency struggle.[27] Instead, it underscores the vital stakes of the endeavor. As historians Artemy M. Kalinovsky and Sergey Radchenko presciently argued in 2019, such rewriting of history served to justify concurrent interventions in Syria and Ukraine.[28] Reckoning with the costs of the Soviet war—in Afghanistan, in the former Soviet Union, and elsewhere—is urgent work, and Ro’i is to be thoroughly commended for undertaking and completing it. One might (modestly) hope for the inclusion of a new epilogue in a paperback edition.
Review by Ronald Grigor Suny, University of Michigan, University of Chicago, emeritus
Whether it was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [twentieth] century” and a “genuine tragedy” for the Russian people, as President Vladimir Putin declared in 2005, or the inevitable demise of a utopian project, the end of which emancipated millions, the collapse of the Soviet Union remains a puzzle for scholars, pundits, and journalists alike. Explanations for the dismantling of the Soviet system and the subsequent disintegration of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a sovereign state (two distinct though related processes) abound. Was this a structural failure, like a bridge or building constructed with faulty materials, or was it caused by wrong-headed policies by muddle-headed leaders unsure of what they were trying to do? Was it Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s overly radical reforms; President Ronald Reagan’s strident anti-Communism; President George H. W. Bush’s reluctance to support the Soviets materially; Russian president Boris Yeltsin’s subversive, ostensibly democratic opposition to preserving the Union; or was it glasnost” and the drip-drip-drip revelations of Soviet crimes; the failure of the reforming economy to provide a prosperous present; the nuclear reactor explosion at Chernobyl; the Armenian earthquake; the inability to solve the national question (Karabakh, the Baltic republics, Ukraine, Georgia); or was it the long “bleeding wound” of the Soviet intervention into Afghanistan? Take your pick. There are more facile “explanations” than careful studies of the devolution of a superpower that disappeared without defeat in a major war.[29]
Yaacov Ro’i enters the fray with a fascinating, detailed, but somewhat rambling study of the fateful fallout of the decision of Leonid Brezhnev’s Politburo to intervene militarily in the burgeoning civil war in Afghanistan between a radical Marxist government in Kabul and regional, religious, and tribal forces opposed to reforms dictated from the capital. Ro’i states right up front that the war “had a major impact on the evolution of Soviet politics and society in the crucial final years of the Soviet Union’s existence, almost certainly precipitating processes that tore the country asunder in 1991, highlighting, undercutting, and reflecting the weaknesses of its regime” (2). Even in his somewhat equivocal phrasing, Ro’i suggests that the Afghan war was central to the Soviet collapse, in the same way that historian Serhy Plokhy emphasizes the role of Ukraine or Vladislav Zubok focuses on the indecision of Gorbachev. The question remains: Was the war decisive in the way that the failure to deal with the “national question” or the inability to improve the economy was? Or was it one relatively minor but manageable complication, like the difficulties presented by Solidarity movement in Poland at the western frontier of the USSR? What weight should the war carry in our understanding of the end of the USSR as inevitable, probable, deeply structural, or the result of largely contingent, agent-driven problems and failures?
In the 1980s and 1990s, at a time when political scientists were theorizing about the transition from dictatorships to democracies, and many authoritarian states managed relatively successful if incomplete democratization (at least for a while), the war in Afghanistan could be seen as beginning with a failed nation-building project by pro-Soviet radicals in Kabul, which was effectively thwarted by traditionalist and religious insurgents.[30] The USSR’s ill-conceived intervention then resulted in international scorn and humiliating defeat and retreat.
Ro’i spends very little space dealing with the larger international context of the war, particularly with the role of the Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan administrations. Widening the lens, it appears that the tragedies that befell Afghanistan lasted longer than they might have because of serious policy differences among American, Soviet, and Pakistani decision-makers. The Soviets had been successful for seven decades in maintaining friendly relations with the various governments in Afghanistan, from the monarchy to the leftist military officers who came to power in a coup d’état in April 1978. Almost from its first days in power, the Marxist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), which was plagued by civil war, desperately appealed to Moscow for military support. The aging Brezhnev regime was reluctant to commit its troops to fighting a guerilla war in Central Asia, appalled by the vicious factionalism of the Afghan regime (leaders arresting, torturing, and executing one another), and repeatedly refused to come to the rescue.[31] Other countries – Pakistan, China, and the United States – aided the anti-Communist forces against the self-styled Marxist regime. Not mentioned in Ro’i’s account is the fact that the Central Intelligence Agency was arming the mujahidin insurgents before the Soviets invaded. In the words of President Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, the United States would give the Soviet Union its own Vietnam.[32]
When more radical elements in the PDPA overthrew the Soviet-backed government, Brezhnev and his closest comrades, suspicious that the militants favored the Americans, decided to intervene to restore more moderate leaders. Regional experts were not consulted, and almost the entire high command in the Soviet military opposed sending troops. With little knowledge of what they were getting into, the Soviet political leadership entered a quagmire that would last nine years. The historian David N. Gibbs, whose scholarship centers on interventions, writes, “The invasion and the occupation of Afghanistan constituted the largest Soviet military action since World War II, while US support for the anti-Soviet resistance was the principal paramilitary operation of the Reagan Doctrine.”[33]
The initial reaction of American foreign policy experts to the invasion was to see it as a Soviet version of the nineteenth-century “Great Game:” the Soviets were aiming at conquest and occupation of Afghanistan in order to achieve access to the Persian Gulf. As the Soviets were drawn into deeper and bloodier warfare in the treacherous terrain of Afghanistan, officials in the United States and Pakistan were divided between “dealers,” who wanted to work with United Nations efforts to mediate a settlement of the conflict and persuade the Soviets to leave, and “bleeders,” who worked to prolong the war, thus ensuring that Soviet casualties would continue, and sabotaged the United Nations” negotiations.
At first the Soviet armed forces were ordered only to secure the new Afghan government, not to engage in the larger civil war. That was their “internationalist duty,” to aid a brother “socialist” government. But when in early 1980 the Soviet Embassy in Kabul was attacked, Moscow unleased its troops to crush the insurgents, and massive civilian deaths from bombs and gunfire from helicopters and bombers alienated even more ordinary Afghans. The Kremlin underestimated the extent of the hostility of the Afghan population toward the Kabul militants, who were themselves fractured into rival factions. As Ro’i notes, “The Soviet intervention denied the PDPA any chance of credibility and exacerbated the regime’s unpopularity” (32). The Soviets were fighting massive popular resistance, a people’s war not unlike what the Americans had experienced in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s.
By the second year of the war in Afghanistan, officers with experience in the field were reporting back to Moscow that the war could not be won by military means, that only a political and diplomatic solution was possible (32). Though some in the military wanted to continue fighting, by 1982 political leaders in the Andropov government in the USSR were already experiencing doubts about the Soviet role in the war and considering withdrawal in agreement with the United Nations. Even before the United States supplied the mujahidin with Stinger missiles, which prolonged the fighting, the Soviets were seeking an off ramp. In his review of Out of Afghanistan by Afghan-hands Diego Cordovez and Selig S. Harrison, Gibbs concludes, “this book provides compelling evidence that the Soviets were far more receptive to diplomacy, while the Americans were significantly less receptive than previously recognized. The Reagan policy of intensifying and prolonging the war in order to bleed the Soviets—and incidentally the Afghans, too—is an important and previously unrecognized feature of this conflict.”[34]
The year that Gorbachev became first secretary of the CPSU, 1985, was “one of the harshest and bloodiest years of the war,” Ro’i reminds us. (47) Gorbachev soon realized that the Soviets needed to move toward withdrawal. A new leader, Muhammad Najib Najibullah, had emerged in Kabul, and he proposed a policy of national reconciliation. But his forces required Soviet backing, and the Soviets already in 1987 were preparing to leave. In April 1988, the Soviets signed an agreement in Geneva with the United States and Pakistan for all Soviet forces to withdraw from the country by mid-February 1989. Against the wishes of the Najibullah government, the Soviets scrupulously carried out the Geneva Accords.
Brzezinski’s was a forceful voice in the argument that the Soviet war in Afghanistan was key to the fall of the Soviet Union, and he even placed himself as a key player in that world historical game. When asked by a French interviewer years later (but nine months before 9/11) if he regretted supporting “Islamic fundamentalism, which has given arms and advice to future terrorists,” Carter’s confident advisor asserted: “What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”[35] After reading Brzezinski’s extraordinarily revealing interview in Le Nouvel Observateur, Gibbs concludes that “the Reagan policy of “bleeding” the Soviets and “fighting to the last Afghan’… actually began during the Carter period. Carter’s foreign policy may have contained a greater element of realpolitik than is commonly supposed.”[36] That realpolitik later cost the Americans and Afghans twenty more years of death and dying before the United States under President Joseph Biden finally, precipitously withdrew the last of its troops in August 2021.
While limiting himself exclusively to the Soviet side of the story, Ro’i presents a social history of those who participated in the war: ordinary soldiers, their officers, women, medics, and a high number of Central Asians. The Soviet army was made up of soldier citizens who had imbibed to a large degree the idealism and humanism of the Soviet project but were shocked and disenchanted once they were plunged into the miseries of actual combat. Drugs and hazing (dedovshchina) contributed to disillusionment. The lack of adequate training for fighting a popular resistance, dealing with a mobilized civilian population, the failure of their government to equip properly the soldiers, and the faulty tactics and logistics remind this reader of similar flaws in the current Russian invasion of Ukraine. Then as now, Soviet fighters were plagued by low morale and “the sense of deception that many soldiers felt at finding themselves fighting the [local] population” (75).
As much as realpolitik and a sense of insecurity influenced Soviet policy and its agents of all ranks, so the belief in Soviet values and their affective effects inspired commitment and sacrifice, which might then have become subject to disillusionment. “Soldiers began asking, “Why are we here? What sense is there in our actions? Why have we become involved in a war?” (76). Doubt among some coexisted with belief in the mission among others. Over time the war itself undermined faith, and the most desperate defected to the enemy. The intrepid and widely respected young journalist Artem Borovik exposed the underside of the war and the burdensome constraints of Soviet censorship on honest reporting. “In Afghanistan,” he wrote, “we bombed not only the detachments of rebels and their caravans, but our own ideals as well. With the war came the reevaluation of our moral and ethical values. In Afghanistan the policies of the government became utterly incompatible with the inherent morality of our nation.”[37] Distancing himself from the Soviet journalist, Ro’i comments in a footnote to this passage, “I refrain from discussing Borovik’s hypothesis regarding the “inherent morality” of the Soviet nation or its system and ideology.”[38]
Borovik was one of the few who challenged the dominant view of the war that was permitted by the censors. During the Brezhnev years only a completely positive and rosy view was permitted. Under Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, a kind of “semi-glasnost” allowed more honest news, but only under Gorbachev was “comprehensive glasnost’” gradually permitted. “Gorbachev used glasnost” as a weapon with which to pull Soviet troops out of the war” (143). “Why not show it?” Gorbachev told his ally Aleksandr Yakovlev. “Why keep it a secret?” (152). It was Borovik’s “honest, graphic dispatches from the front” in Ogonek that blew the lid off the censorship.[39] “War tears the halo of secrecy away from death,” he wrote in his Diary of a Reporter after receiving permission from high military brass to “publish what he saw.”[40]
Ro’i is scrupulous in recording the variety of opinions and attitudes, many of them contradictory, toward the war and those who fought in it, who are known as afgantsy. Veterans were given privileged access to goods and positions when they returned, but at the same time they were often blamed for the Soviet defeat. As the economy and political order in the USSR disintegrated, wounded and maimed soldiers often did not receive the care they needed. Their zinc coffins were brought home in secret and buried without fanfare. Soviet mothers organized to protect their sons against the draft and save those from harassment once inducted. Their sacrifice was not recognized by the society for which they had fought, and they never formed an effective united force in the post-war Soviet Union. Afgantsy made up a lost generation.
Central Asians made up a significant proportion of the afgantsy, especially in the first year of the war, and experienced some affinity with the Afghans. Yet even though there were instances of condescension, discrimination, and even harassment of Soviet Central Asian soldiers and officers at the hands of Slavs, the recruits from Soviet Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan did not see themselves as ethnics or Muslims but as Soviets fulfilling their “international duty” to defeat the mujahidin enemy. “These people were Uzbeks and Tajiks just like us,” one soldier told a Western scholar. “And we could speak with them. But we were there as Soviet soldiers. So we had to fight for our country. And they would also see a difference. They told us, “Yes, you are Tajik but you are Soviet and not real Muslims. If we fight you, we will kill you’.”[41] Soviet Central Asians saw themselves as modern and those practicing Islam as backward, divided from them by “a border in time, a line between two social and economic systems, between two philosophies.”[42]
As the writ of Moscow weakened over the peripheries of the USSR and nationalisms took hold in the vacuum left by the erosion of Marxism-Leninism, perestroika descended into violence in the borderland republics of the USSR. Afgantsy, both officers and soldiers who had fought in the war, were used to quell nationalist protests in Tbilisi (April 1989), Dushanbe (February 1990), Nagorno-Karabakh (1990-1991), Riga and Vilnius (January 1991), and the Azerbaijani pogrom of Armenians in Baku (January 1991). In several of those clashes they faced fellow afgantsy standing side-by-side with the protestors. When people came out onto the streets in Moscow and Leningrad in August 1991to resist the coup against Gorbachev, afgantsy were on both sides of the barricades. One of the three who was killed defending the White House was a veteran of the war.
The central argument of Ro’i’s book is that “The loss of faith in the military… was a direct and significant consequence of the Afghan War [that] reflected the population’s attitude to the entire Soviet system.” The war eroded trust in the military, “which had always been a bulwark of the regime,” and fed into skepticism about the regime that ultimately contributed “to the erosion of the party’s authority and of the system with which the military was identified” (135). “The war, then, became a symbol for the moral ills and political tensions gripping late Soviet society,” a symbol far more powerful than the daily difficulties that people were living through (178). Ro’i concludes that “the perceived failure of the military in Afghanistan when pitted against the myth of its invincibility, on the one hand and, on the other, its role as representative of the might of the Soviet superpower and the validity of Marxism-Leninism severely undermined the entire system and the legends on which it rested” (179).
Most accounts that attempt to explain the collapse of the Soviet Union acknowledge the baleful effects of the Afghan war and the defeat of the Soviet army, but rather than a principal cause, they see those effects as assisting the end of state socialism.[43] Far more consequential were the failures of economic reform; the weakening of the central authority by the central authority, that is, the discrediting of the Communist Party both by Gorbachev and the leaders of the putsch of August 1991; the examples of East European regimes fleeing from Communism to various forms of capitalism and democracy; the pulling away from the Union by leaders in Russia and Ukraine; and the popular nationalist movements in the non-Russian republics, particularly in the Baltic region and South Caucasus. Ro’i sharpens the focus on the complex ways that the war in Afghanistan affected popular perceptions of the Soviet regime and its foundational ideological framing, and his final judgment, after more than 300 pages of detailed information on the war, its initiators, participants, and victims, is sober, unsurprising, and in line with most other analysts.
The anomaly of a controlled economy that bred low productivity and technological backwardness; the hegemony of the party with its rigid hierarchy, corrupt bureaucracy, and defunct ideology that provided its sole legitimization; and the composition of the Soviet empire that could not cater to ethnic diversity and growing demands; these were the factors that led to the Soviet Union’s disintegration. The Soviet Afghan War, in contrast, was not a root or systemic cause, but it played a role in the unraveling. The war almost certainly precipitated the Soviet Union’s final collapse. In many ways it reflected the forces that sealed the fate of the world’s second superpower. It served as a catalyst, giving momentum to processes that it had not set in motion (304).
Not a cause but an accelerant, the Soviet-Afghan War was one more blow to a system that was more fragile than its rulers, people, and enemies realized.
Written and published before the American military abandoned Afghanistan and Russian forces invaded Ukraine, Ro’i’s book offers insights and examples that resonate with the experiences of both countries in those conflicts and earlier wars. Each side had its own idea of what it was doing. While the American military trained to fight what it called “counterinsurgency,” the Soviet military saw its “local wars” as fighting “counter-revolutionaries.” But whatever they called it, both the Soviet and US efforts to install their own allies in Kabul failed, largely because of the mountainous terrain and the lack of support in significant parts of the population outside the capital. The Soviets left their comrades to fend for themselves after 1989 without looking back; Afghan leader Muhmmad Najib Najibullah was captured by the Taliban, tortured, castrated, and hanged from a traffic light. The Trump administration made an agreement with the Taliban to spare US forces while they began their withdrawal, leaving the Kabul government without the backing it needed. The Soviets and their supporters, in Ro’i’s telling, paid a huge price for war and withdrawal. The Biden administration was humiliated and pilloried for the chaotic scramble out of Kabul.
The veteran Soviet officers, diplomats, and politicians of the time soberly assessed the failure in Afghanistan. A prominent Soviet general lamented after the exit from Afghanistan, “We lost to some degree the prestige that the Soviet Union and its armed forces enjoyed after the victorious Great Patriotic War” (131). Thirty years after Gorbachev had traded the hegemony over East Central Europe that the USSR had secured after World War II for what turned out to be empty promises from the West, President Vladimir Putin eliminated the last vestiges of the reputation and historic glories that Russia and the Soviet Union had gained in its defeat of actually existing fascism by falsely labelling the Ukrainian government “Nazis” and invading Ukraine. The parallels and divergences of the Ukrainian war and the Afghan war include a practice of disguising the reality of warfare. The Soviets insisted on calling their Afghan incursion “internationalist assistance,” while Putin uses the anodyne phrase “special military operation” for Ukraine. The lesson that Putin did not learn from the Afghan war is found in the warning from a Soviet diplomat that Russia should not frivolously go to war abroad without careful consultation with experts and “clarity of their strategic goal” (131-132). But then mislearning the lesson of the last war seems to be endemic. Despite what had happened in Afghanistan, Russian leader Boris Yeltsin tried to subdue Chechnya in 1994 and was forced to retreat. After Vietnam, the United States invaded Iraq twice, only to leave a devastated landscape, a ruined, divided society, and a country closer politically to Iran, an American nemesis.
The Soviet move into Afghanistan can be explained by the simple logic of realpolitik: to prevent a neighboring country from falling under the influence of rival powers. But it also had an ideological cause as well: to prevent a “fraternal” regime, an ostensibly “socialist” government, from being overthrown by reactionary forces and their foreign supporters. The ultimate withdrawal after nine years of fighting did not undermine seriously the security of the Soviet state, but it weakened the image of the USSR as a great power and a potent historical actor presenting a convincing alternative to Western liberalism. The parallels between the Soviet war to preserve its ally in Afghanistan and the disastrous American wars to prevent the Communist victory in South Vietnam, change the regime in Iraq, or defeat the Taliban are as glaring as the analogies to the Ukrainian conflict. Driven by both strategic and ideological concerns, they all caused enormous losses primarily to those whom the invaders believed they were assisting They discredited the superpowers that thought they could impose their will on others. Gorbachev at least ultimately realized the costs of imperial overreach: “We put an end of the foreign policy that served the utopian end of spreading communist ideas around the world…inflicted on the people an intolerable burden of military expenditure, and dragged us into adventures like the one in Afghanistan” (284). On the day the last Soviet soldier left Afghanistan, Pravda wrote, “We have become wiser” (284).
Response by Yaacov Ro’i, Tel Aviv University
It is my pleasant duty to respond to the comments I have received from four separate reviewers tasked to review my book for H-Diplo. But first of all, I wish to express my thanks to all four—Alessandro Iandolo, Sarah Mendelson, Robert Rakove and Ron Suny—for the pains they took and the constructive end-product they provided, as well as to H-Diplo and Tom Maddux personally for initiating the project. My book’s reviewers naturally find different advantages and flaws in the book, but they share the effort of plowing through a rather long book that is not always easy reading and which inevitably left them with a somewhat gloomy perspective in light of the present Russo-Ukrainian war.
The one major criticism I feel I need to address is that of Sarah Mendelson regarding the interviews. I of course agree that it would a priori have been preferable to have a larger sample and for it to have been more random. But I was under considerable logistic constraints and was unable to undertake the optimal course. Given the alternative of discarding in toto the notion of bringing figures and tables with the help of interviews, or deriving from them what I found possible, I opted for the latter, and still believe that even if my findings are not “robust,” they do supply important and valuable insights that enabled me to attain a far richer overview than would have been possible without them. I certainly endeavored to refrain from making unduly rash or dogmatic statements on the basis of their results. As to Chechen and Ingush veterans, since the idea was to get a number of interviews proportional to the number of co-ethnics who served in the 40th Army, and I gave results per ethnicity only when I had at least ten interviews from a given group, there were insufficient respondents to justify any generalizations. Undoubtedly, there are still avenues of research that it would do well to follow.
I would like to use the present opportunity to take up two other issues. One is the attitude to the war and its Soviet belligerents—the afgantsy—since the demise of the Soviet Union. Through no fault of their own—that is, not because they did anything specific or took a certain path, but merely because of changing political, social and economic circumstances—the veterans tended to get the thick end of the wedge. True, under Soviet leader Vladimir Putin, whatever their physical and material welfare as individuals, their prestige as a group generally ran relatively high, reflecting his regime’s attitude to the war and the goal of broadening the sweep of Russian/Soviet imperialism, whatever ideological guise it be given. Any reservation regarding the military worthwhileness, let alone the political morality and political or economic cost, of venturing on a military campaign beyond the borders of the national territory was alien to an evaluation of the Soviet-Afghan War in officially sanctioned publications or speeches. There could be no talk of the war having been lost or having cast reflection on the prowess of the Soviet military; the Soviet establishment too had been similarly loath to express or even countenance any such thought. On the contrary, it argued, it scored significant achievements. Under Putin, both the war and the Afghan veteran organizations became what Michael Galbas has called “a medium for and a pillar of” Russia’s current “militarization and patriotic political ideology and tendencies.”[44]
The second issue is the Soviet-Afghan war’s relevance to the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war. As the book’s reviewers could not help but note, the similarities are blatant, to the point of evoking incredulity in the Western observer. Unquestionably, there are also manifest differences, especially the fact that Ukraine had long been part—indeed an important, major and generally acknowledged part—of the Russian empire, whereas Afghanistan had at best merely belonged to the Russian/Soviet sphere of influence. Nor is Ukraine a land with a physically inhospitable terrain and climate or population-wise divided up between, and hence dominated by, mutually antagonistic mountain tribes. Yet both countries have long traditions of a national pride that has struggled to assert itself in the face of the innate aggressiveness and imperial ambitions of their great-power neighbor. For its part, the Soviet/Russian partner has not changed essentially with the transformation of its regime, or at least of its regime’s outward apparel. Although Putin claims to have overcome many of the lacunae of his country’s military establishment and apparatus, the indications are that such adjustments, improvements, and reorganization that have come about or been imposed have in fact merely touched the surface. We have been witness since February 2022 to the all-too-familiar phenomena to the student of the Soviet-Afghan War: logistical incompetence; disgruntlement among the senior command at military considerations not being given primary weight in strategic decisions; junior officers not being allowed, or often even wanting, to make tactical decisions in situ; and troops without appropriate training, and lacking the morale that can give them the requisite incentive to succeed in their military assignments among a civilian population, and giving vent to their frustration at their miserable physical conditions by brutal excesses against the local populace.
And on the political level: the failure to do a serious survey of the atmosphere, mentalité, and socio-political wherewithal of the local population in the country being invaded; the same mendacity and covering-up of what is happening in the field, to the point of the identical denial of there being a war; the minimizing of the casualty rate, which today is infinitely higher than it was in Afghanistan, partly, but apparently not solely, because the force actually engaged is far larger; the quelling of all anti-war protests, even the preliminary silencing of all potential sources of remonstrance. The question everyone is asking is whether eventually Putin, too, will have to retreat under one pretext or another in view of the domestic pressures and constraints imposed upon him by the war, and whether he and his regime will be able to survive politically if and when this contingency occurs. To me personally, on the basis of my understanding of the dynamics of the Soviet-Afghan experience, the answer to the first part of the query is positive and to the second negative.
In a mise-en-scène closer to the Western public than Afghanistan was, and one which is all the more shocking for it taking place in Europe under world scrutiny, the Russo-Ukrainian war has brought out once more the fact that while it may be relatively easy to decide on initiating a war (and all the indications are that Putin planned his campaign for a longer time and more carefully than did his predecessors in the Kremlin in 1979), once it is underway it tends to get out of hand and progress in ways not contemplated by its progenitors. This entails, among others, in parallel with colossal suffering and loss of life, a socio-political backlash on the home front nowhere near the scenes of violence and horror that engulf both soldiers and civilians.
[1] Anthony Arnold, The Fateful Pebble: Afghanistan’s Role in the Fall of the Soviet Empire (San Francisco: Presidio Press, 1993).
[2] Artemy M. Kalinovsky, A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011);
[3] Bobbi Ann Mason, In Country (New York: Harper & Row, 1985); Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1990); Apocalypse Now, directed by Francis Ford Coppola (1979; Hollywood: United Artists), film; First Blood, directed by Ted Kotcheff (1982; Hollywood: Orion), film; Full Metal Jacket, directed by Stanley Kubrick (1989; Hollywood: Warner Bros.), film.
[4] Among the few exceptions were Mark Galleoti, Afghanistan: The Soviet Union’s Last War (London: Frank Cass, 2001). More recently, there has been good work on the war’s effects on domestic politics and on veterans. See, for example Markus Gorranson, At the Service of the State: Soviet-Afghan War Veterans in Tajikistan, 1979–1992 (PhD Thesis: Aberystwyth University, 2016). See also Artemy Kalinovsky, “Central Asian Soldiers and the Soviet War in Afghanistan: An Introduction” in Marlene Laruelle, ed., The Central Asia–Afghanistan Relationship from Soviet Intervention to the Silk Road Initiatives (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2017), 3-21.
[5] See above, and also Rodric Braithwaite, Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979-1989 (London: Profile Books, 2011); Timothy Nunan, Humanitarian Invasion: Global Development in Cold War Afghanistan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
[6] Although the US war in Vietnam was and is frequently invoked when discussing the Soviet war in Afghanistan, there has been little systematic analysis. Jonathan Brunstedt is currently working on a project examining the way the “Vietnam War” analogy shaped discussions of the war and policy towards the USSR in the US, and ultimately within Soviet and Russian politics as well. See “Drawing Lessons from the Soviet-Afghan War: A Conversation with Title VIII Research Scholar Jonathan Brunsted,” https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/drawing-lessons-soviet-afghan-war-conversation-title-viii-research-scholar-jonathan [Accessed May 26, 2023].
[7] Artemy M. Kalinovsky, A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Timothy Nunan, Humanitarian Invasion: Global Development in Cold War Afghanistan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Elisabeth Leake, Afghan Crucible: The Soviet Invasion and the Making of Modern Afghanistan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022).
[8] Mark Galeotti, Afghanistan: The Soviet Union’s Last War (London: Frank Cass, 1995); Svetlana Alexevich, Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War (New York: Norton, 1990).
[9] This focus differs from, for example, my own work, Sarah E. Mendelson, Changing Course: Ideas, Politics, and the Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998) and Gregory Feifer, The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan (New York: Harper Collins, 2009). Artem Borovik, The Hidden War: A Russian Journalist’s Account of the Soviet War in Afghanistan, (New York: Atlantic Monthly, 1990) may be the best Russian reporting on the conditions the troops faced on the ground. See also Rodric Braithwaite, Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979-1989 (London: Profile Books, 2011). A new translation of Svetlana Alexievich, Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War, translated by Andrew Bromfield (New York: Norton, 2023) is also an important contribution.
[10] Mendelson, Changing Course.
[11] See David Remnick, Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire (New York: Vintage, 1994); Vladislav M. Zubok, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021); and Scott Shane, Dismantling Utopia: How Information Ended the Soviet Union (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1994).
[12] Catherine Belton, Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took on the West (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), 51-61.
[13] Reporting on Russia’s war in Ukraine is widespread. Three comprehensive sources include https://www.nytimes.com/news-event/ukraine-russia, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/war-in-ukraine/, and https://www.justsecurity.org/82513/just-securitys-russia-ukraine-war-archive/. This review was written in January 2023.
[14] William E. Odom, The Collapse of the Soviet Military (New Haven: Yale University, 1998).
[15] Within just three months, these estimates rose from about 100,000 to near 200,000 reflecting fierce fighting in the East at the end of 2022. For assessments in November 2022, see https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-63580372 and
https://www.businessinsider.com/uk-defense-chief-releases-numbers-putin-russia-war-losses-ukraine-2022-12. For the 200,000 assessment, see https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/02/us/politics/ukraine-russia-casualties.html
[16] Condoleezza Rice and Robert M. Gates, “Time is not on Ukraine’s side,” Washington Post, 7 January 2023, available at https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/01/07/condoleezza-rice-robert-gates-ukraine-repel-russia/. For a different view, see Arkady Ostrovsky, “Russia Risks Becoming Ungovernable and Descending into Chaos,” The Economist, 18 November 2022 available at https://www.economist.com/the-world-ahead/2022/11/18/russia-risks-becoming-ungovernable-and-descending-into-chaos.
[17] Artemy M. Kalinovsky, A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), 17–24; Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 306–26; Sarah Elizabeth Mendelson, Changing Course: Ideas, Politics, and the Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 39–64.
[18] Washington had, of course, acted with comparable irrationality upon rediscovering the Soviet brigade stationed in Cuba.
[19] Mark Galeotti, Afghanistan, the Soviet Union’s Last War (Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1995). Rodric Braithwaite’s Afgantsy offers a narrative depiction of the war, with greater emphasis on the initial Soviet deployment and the battlefield; see Rodric Braithwaite, Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979-1989 (London: Profile, 2011). Elisabeth Leake’s recent book also considers the effects of the war on Soviet policymaking and includes discussion of the soldiers’ experience; see Elisabeth Leake, Afghan Crucible: The Soviet Invasion and the Making of Modern Afghanistan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), 96–106.
[20] Galeotti also touches upon the effects of PTSD. See Galeotti, Afghanistan, 69–70, 86.
[21] Christian G. Appy, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (United States: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
[22] Appy writes: “The war’s most serious psychological traumas lie in the moral distress many veterans have carried from the war itself: the hurt and guilt that come with confronting the prospect that one risked, witnessed, and inflicted violence on behalf of an unjustifiable cause, that one participated in forms of brutality that were not only often excessive and arbitrary but were unconnected to a persuasive or consistent political mission.” Appy, Working-Class War, 319.
[23] Again, Appy: “The most common experiences of rejection were not explicit acts of hostility but quieter, sometimes more devastating forms of withdrawal, suspicion, and indifference.” Appy, Working-Class War, 306.
[24] Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).
[25] Lucian Kim, “Many Russians Today Take Pride In Afghan War That Foretold Soviet Demise,” NPR, 21 February 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/02/21/696008981/many-russians-today-take-pride-in-afghan-war-that-foretold-soviet-demise.
[26] “General Sergei Surovikin: Who Is Putin’s Hard-Line New Commander in Ukraine?,” BBC News, 12 October 2022, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-63217467.
[27] The great historian Robert D. Schulzinger, who passed away on 28 December 2022, authored an incisive, remarkably thorough analysis of subsequent U.S. efforts to grapple with the Vietnam War’s myriad legacies. Robert D. Schulzinger, A Time for Peace: The Legacy of the Vietnam War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
[28] Artemy M. Kalinovsky and Sergey Radchenko, “Why Russia No Longer Regrets Its Invasion of Afghanistan,” Washington Post, 15 February 2019, http://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/02/15/why-russia-no-longer-regrets-its-invasion-afghanistan/.
[29] For divergent accounts, see Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993); Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy, A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991 (New York: The Free Press, 1994); Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, 2008); Serhy Plokhy, The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union (New York: Basic Books, 2014); and Vladislav M. Zubok, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021).
[30] D.A. Rustow, “Transitions to Democracy: Towards a Dynamic Model,” Comparative Politics, 2(3) (1970): 337–367; Guillermo O’Donnell & Philippe Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). Philippe C. Schmitter, “Reflections on “Transitology’: Before and After,” in Daniel M. Brinks, Marcelo Leiras and Scott Mainwaring (eds), Reflections on Uneven Democracies: The Legacy of Guillermo O’Donnell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014): 71-86; and Valerie Bunce, “Should Transitologists be Grounded?” Slavic Review, 54 (1) (1995): 111–127.
[31] See the stenographic minutes of the March 17, 1979, meeting of the Soviet Politburo; https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB57/r1.pdf; and for a broader view of the whole process, David N. Gibbs, “Reassessing Soviet Motives for Invading Afghanistan: A Declassified History,” Critical Asian Studies, 38:2 (2006), pp. 239-263, DOI: 10.1080/14672710600671228
[32] Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Les Révélations d’un Ancien Conseiller de Carter: “Oui, la CIA est Entrée en Afghanistan avant les Russes . . .’” Le Nouvel Observateur [Paris] (January 15-21, 1998); a translated transcript of the entire interview is given in David N. Gibbs, “Review Essay: Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion in Retrospective,” International Politics, XXXVII (June 2000), 241-242. For confirmation of the early aid to the Mujahidin, see Robert Michael Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 146-147.
[33] Gibbs, “Review Essay,” 233.
[34] Gibbs, “Review Essay,” 238; See, Diego Cordovez and Selig S. Harrison’s Out of Afghanistan: The Inside Story of the Soviet Withdrawal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
[35] Brzezinski, “Les Révélations d’un Ancien Conseiller de Carter,” in Gibbs, “Review Essay,” 242.
[36] Gibbs, “Review Essay,” 243; Cordovez and Harrison, Out of Afghanistan, 10.
[37] Cited in Cordovez and Harrison, Out of Afghanistan, 1-2.
[38] Cordovez and Harrison, Out of Afghanistan, fn. 2.
[39] New York Times reporter Hedrick Smith, Cited in Cordovez and Harrison, Out of Afghanistan, 152.
[40] Borovik, cited in Cordovez and Harrison, Out of Afghanistan, 152.
[41] Cordovez and Harrison, Out of Afghanistan, 268.
[42] Cordovez and Harrison, Out of Afghanistan, 269.
[43] See footnote 1 for accounts that refer to various causes of the collapse but do not elevate the war in Afghanistan to a primary cause.
[44] Michael Galbas, “’Our Pain and Our Glory’: Social Strategies of Legitimization and Functionalization of the Soviet-Afghan War in the Russian Federation,” Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society 1, no. 2 (2015): 132