Andrei Sakharov, the Nobel Prize winner who had helped develop the Soviet hydrogen bomb, also demanded the withdrawal of Soviet troops and their replacement by UN or neutral Muslim forces. He called for the widest possible boycott of the Olympic Games, which were shortly due to be held in Moscow, and castigated the militaristic thinking which had led first to the invasion of Czechoslovakia and now to the invasion of Afghanistan.11 He was exiled to the provincial city of Gorky (Nizhni Novgorod) for his pains. That summer, Tatiana Goricheva and Natalya Malachuskaya were expelled from the Soviet Union for appealing to conscripts to go to prison rather than serve in Afghanistan.12
Even inside the official machine, some were filled from the very beginning with a sense of foreboding, not only for the fate of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, but for the fate of the Soviet Union itself. On 20 January Academician Oleg Bogomolov of the Institute of the Economy of the World Socialist System, one of Moscow’s most prestigious think tanks, sent a stinging analysis to the Central Committee and to Andropov, the head of the KGB. The paper was entitled ‘Some Ideas about Foreign Policy Results of the 1970s (Theses)’ and it contained a substantial section on the consequences of the Afghan adventure. It pointed out that the rebels could now appeal to the Afghan people to fight the foreign infidels as well as the godless Communists in Kabul. The USSR had got itself involved in yet another confrontation, this time on its volatile southern flank. Aid to the rebels from the Americans, the Arabs, and the Chinese was increasing. The Soviet Union’s influence on the Non-Aligned Movement had already suffered. Détente and arms control had been blocked. Even some of the Warsaw Pact countries seemed unhappy. The invasion might even help to reconcile the USA and Iran, despite the crisis in which the two countries were now locked.13
All these disadvantages had, of course, been pointed out in the policy discussions which preceded the decision to invade. The paper was too late to influence events and produced no reaction from those to whom it had been addressed. But at least the authors were not punished.
The Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies had carried on the distinguished academic tradition of the Russian Orientalists of the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries. Their Afghanistan department was strongly staffed with scholars who covered every aspect of the country’s political, economic, and social life. Many of the linguists were called up at the beginning of the war to serve as interpreters and specialist advisers. There was no way of hiding what was going on from the staff of the institute, where opinion was almost entirely against the war. But the politicians did not listen to them either.14
The British Foreign Office presented a Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister who visited them in January 1980 with a historical account of British failures in Afghanistan. He said, ‘This time it will be different,’ as people usually do when they set out to repeat the mistakes of their predecessors.15
Many well-placed officials inside the government machine were appalled. Anatoli Chernyaev, an official in the International Department of the Central Committee Secretariat, described in his diary on 30 December how the rest of the world had universally condemned the Soviet action. The Soviet Union’s claims to be promoting détente lay in ruins. ‘Who needed that? The Afghan people? Amin might well have turned the place into a second Cambodia. But was it merely out of a sense of revolutionary philanthropy and charity that we have taken a step that will be classed in world opinion with Finland in 1939 and Czechoslovakia in 1968? The argument that we had to act to defend our frontiers is laughable… I don’t think there has ever been a time in the history of Russia, not even under Stalin, when such an important step was decided in such a small circle, without any hint of the slightest consultation, advice, discussion, consideration.’ A few weeks later, as he tried to work out how and why the decision had been taken, he concluded, ‘In a word—the very existence of the state, not only its prestige, is at stake because the whole system and the mechanisms of power have decayed, because of the psychological decay of the supreme leader, and the advanced years of the other leaders whose average age is seventy-five. And there is absolutely no way out.’ Speculation about who was behind the decision to invade was spreading among officials in Moscow. Chernyaev drew what he thought was the obvious conclusion: the KGB had exploited Brezhnev’s incapacity in order to launch this ‘crime’.16
Early in the New Year Anatoli Adamishin, an up-and-coming official in the Foreign Ministry, wrote even more strongly in his own diary: ‘A few days ago we moved our troops into Afghanistan. What an exceptionally ill-considered decision! What are they thinking about? It’s clear that they are showing one another how tough they are. OK, let’s show our muscle. In reality it is an act of weakness, of despair. To hell with Afghanistan. Why on earth should we get mixed up in a completely lost situation? We are wasting our moral capital, others will stop trusting us entirely. We have not been in such a mess since the Crimean War in the last century: everyone is against us, and our allies are weak and unreliable. If they are incapable of running their own country, then we will not succeed in teaching them anything with our economy in tatters, our inability to manage our political affairs or to organise anything properly and so on. What’s more, we seem to be getting mixed up in a civil war, even though it is being fed from abroad. Did we learn nothing from Vietnam? Why should we try to play the role of a universal saviour, when we need to work out properly what we want in our own external and internal affairs. The terrible thing is that this is not what concerns our leaders. Their concern is to hold on to power, to engage in domestic manoeuvres, to demonstrate their high ideological principles, which incidentally we no longer understand ourselves… The action in Afghanistan is the quintessence of our internal affairs. The economic disorganisation, the fear of the Central Asian republics, the approaching Congress, the habit of deciding problems by force, the ideological dogmatism—what sort of a socialist revolution is that, what sort of revolutionaries are these? There is the same obscurity everywhere. What sort of help can we give them? We were better off with the King [Zahir Shah]: at least he listened to us.’17
The Outside World Reacts
The Americans had of course been keeping close track of what the Russians were up to in Afghanistan. Their most reliable resource was satellite intelligence, which enabled them to follow the changes in Soviet military dispositions. But they were painfully aware that they had very little idea of what lay behind the Soviet moves. On 17 September 1978 Thomas Thomson, the President’s assistant for national security, sent his boss, Zbigniew Brzezinski, a memorandum entitled ‘What are the Soviets doing in Afghanistan’. His answer was blunt: ‘Simply, we don’t know’.18 The Americans correctly concluded after the Herat rising that the Russians would be unlikely to send their army to support an unpopular Afghan government.19 By the autumn they still judged that the forces the Russians were now assembling were sufficient only to protect Soviet citizens, not to subdue the country. They nevertheless began to make contingency plans in case the Russians did invade after all.20 Later the analysts were blamed for not having predicted the invasion earlier. The CIA’s own post-mortem showed that what had gone wrong was quite simple: the Russians themselves had been uncertain until the last minute if, when, or in what numbers to invade, and so there was no basis on which an earlier assessment could sensibly have been made.
With far less intelligence capacity than the Americans, the British were also keeping track of events. The murder of Taraki, they thought, did raise the possibility that the Soviets might move into Afghanistan. One British official wondered towards the end of November 1979, perhaps presciently, ‘Wouldn’t we be better off with a socialist regime rather than a reactionary Islamic type that is giving us problems elsewhere?’21
After the invasion had taken place, most British and American analysts tended to agree that the Soviets had undertaken it with reluctance, in order to prevent the crumbling of their position in a country which was within their legitimate sphere of influence. Both before and after the invas
ion, British analysts specifically rejected the idea—popular in the press at the time—that the Russians were after a warm-water port in the Indian Ocean. And indeed no serious evidence has yet emerged, beyond a couple of remarks reported in one Soviet military memoir, that the Soviet invasion was intended as a first step towards securing a warm-water port or—another theme of Western propaganda—towards incorporating Afghanistan into the Soviet Union.22
Both themes were, however, to form a telling element in the all-out campaign of public denunciation which was now unleashed by the Americans and the British. The Soviets, they said, had violated international law with their brutal and unprovoked surprise attack on a very small neighbour. The claim that the Soviet forces had been invited in was a transparent fiction, just as it had been before the invasion of Czechoslovakia. It was another example of the Soviet Union’s insatiable imperial appetite, of their claim that the so-called ‘Brezhnev Doctrine’ gave them the right to keep countries in their bloc by force.
The outrage was genuinely felt, but there was also an element of posturing. The Americans were still smarting over their humiliation at the hands of the Iranians, who had just taken American diplomats hostage in Tehran. President Carter was determined to show his mettle and remarked to an aide, ‘Because of the way that I’ve handled Iran, they think I don’t have the guts to do anything. You’re going to be amazed at how tough I’m going to be.’23 He publicly denounced the Soviets on 28 December, told his cabinet that the invasion was ‘the greatest threat to world peace since the Second World War’ (ignoring the much more dangerous crises around Cuba and Berlin in Khrushchev’s day), called for a world boycott of the forthcoming Moscow Olympic Games, and imposed economic sanctions. The British Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher (1925–), enthusiastically followed suit.24 On 23 January, in his annual State of the Union Address, the President accused the Soviet Union of deliberately moving to threaten Western oil supplies and said, ‘Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.’25 This uncompromising language, which soon became known as the ‘Carter Doctrine’, was at least as bad as anything the Soviet leaders had contemplated when they were weighing up the arguments for intervention. All hopes of salvaging détente were dead.
Just as the critics in Moscow had predicted, the non-aligned nations were in uproar. On 14 January 104 countries supported an American resolution in the UN condemning the invasion. A similar resolution was introduced annually, and support for it grew every year.26
Support for the Olympics boycott was more lukewarm. British athletes refused to do what Mrs Thatcher told them, and only China, Japan, the German Federal Republic, and Canada joined the United States in a full boycott. Carter had to buy off American grain producers to compensate them for losing the Soviet market. The Americans’ allies were just as reluctant to support sanctions if their own commercial interests were affected. There was in any case no way that the Soviets could have bowed to the Olympic boycott and the economic sanctions. Soviet policy towards Afghanistan was unaffected.
The Americans and the British turned instead to more practical measures. On 26 December, the day after the Russians crossed the frontier, Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s National Security Advisor, told him that the Russians were on the verge of achieving their age-old goal, access to the Indian Ocean: the moment, perhaps, at which this myth was born. Brzezinski judged that Afghanistan was unlikely to become the Soviet Vietnam, because unlike the Vietnamese the Afghan rebels were badly organised and led, had no organised army, no central government, and negligible outside support. But the comparison with Vietnam was to colour American thinking for the next nine years, as it coloured the thinking of the Russians. Ways should be found, said Brzezinski, to make the Soviets pay.27
It was not as if the Americans had so far been idle. Even before the Herat rising in March 1979, well before there had been any question of Soviet troops entering Afghanistan, the CIA had put forward proposals for helping the growing anti-Communist rebellion. President Carter decided at the end of March that the Soviet presence in Afghanistan must be reversed. American officials were already drawing the parallel with Vietnam. In the summer Carter authorised the CIA to spend $500,000 on helping the Afghan rebels. Brzezinski later claimed that this was not a deliberate move to provoke the Soviets to intervene, but that ‘we knowingly increased the probability that they would’.28
The Saudis and the Chinese looked as if they too would help. But the Pakistani role would be crucial. The Americans were in a dilemma. They were pressing the Pakistanis to rein in their nuclear weapons programme, but the pressures needed to bend the Pakistanis to their will were incompatible with seeking their aid on Afghanistan. Brzezinski persuaded the President to swallow his scruples and give the Afghan project priority over non-proliferation. Within weeks of the invasion, the US covert agencies were meeting their British, French, and German counterparts to discuss practical ways of supporting the mujahedin.
American assistance to the mujahedin was at first comparatively modest. President Reagan (1911–2004) had now taken over from Carter, and his new CIA director, William Casey, a religious man, believed that Christianity and Islam could combine against the godless Soviets. Charlie Wilson, the Congressman who mustered support for the mujahedin, said, ‘There were 58,000 dead in Vietnam, and we owe the Russians one.’29 Casey redefined the objective. The aim should not be to make the Russians bleed, but to drive them out of Afghanistan altogether. The American programme expanded massively. After 1985 the American deliveries of arms multiplied by a factor of ten. The Pakistanis funnelled most of this stuff to the more radical groups. By the time the project ceased at the end of 1991, the Americans had given assistance to the rebels of up to $9 billion, supplemented by very large sums from the Saudis.30
The mujahedin cause began to move out of the executive branch, win patrons in Congress in both parties, and become a major issue in US domestic politics. This made it harder for the American government to negotiate flexibly with the Russians when the time came, established even the least reputable of the mujahedin leaders as heroes, and helped to blind the Americans to the nature of the forces they had helped to unleash.31
The Russians knew, of course, that Soviet military deployments were readily visible to Western spy satellites and other intelligence gatherers. Years later the Soviet generals asked themselves why the Americans had made no comment, made no protest, and issued no meaningful warnings. They concluded that the Americans deliberately planned to entrap the Russians in a quagmire.32 It is not much of an excuse. The Americans did warn the Russians on several occasions before the invasion that they could not be indifferent to what the Russians got up to in Afghanistan. And if there was an American trap, the Russians should have had more sense than to fall into it.
The Heroes Go Home
For the men who had captured the Taj Bek Palace none of this mattered too much. They knew that they had taken part in a remarkable feat of arms. But it had been a very confused business, and in later years many of the participants found it hard to remember exactly what had happened. ‘Much has been wiped from my memory,’ remarked Vladimir Grishin of the Muslim Battalion. ‘When veterans of the Great Patriotic War talk, I am surprised at how well they can remember. I have switched off several episodes. Some of it remained there in my memory: for example, for several months I could sense the smell of flesh and blood.’33 A survivor later remembered that the fight on the staircase was just like the storming of the Berlin Reichstag in April 1945, one of the most celebrated moments of the Second World War. Another was surprised when he revisited the ruined palace some years later how narrow the staircase was: he remembered it being as broad as the Odessa Steps in the film of The Battleship Potemkin. One of them wondered whether the deception that had been practised on the A
fghan defenders—ostensibly their comrades in arms—had not amounted to outright treachery. He consoled himself with the thought that the Russian soldiers had had no choice but to win, and that victory could have been achieved no other way.
These men were later to be treated as heroes who had turned a glorious page of Russian military history. But for the time being the authorities in Moscow were determined that the details of the assault on the palace should remain secret, and so they did for nearly ten years. The men were sworn to absolute silence, their heroism was recognised with an absolute minimum of pomp, and no concessions were made in matters of discipline. Lieutenant Vostrotin and his 9th Company of the 345th Guards Independent Parachute Assault Regiment did not rejoin their unit in Bagram until New Year’s Eve. They used the time to good effect, collecting bits and pieces lying around the palace: German helmets worn by Amin’s palace guard, television sets, ghetto blasters, pistols, carpets, and a sewing machine. They loaded them on a lorry and took them off to Bagram to improve the limited amenities of their camp. Alas, their regimental commander, Colonel Nikolai Serdyukov, chose—probably with justification under military law—to regard their actions as looting. The soldiers were relieved of their prizes, Vostrotin was threatened with court martial, and his action cost him both the medal and the promotion he had hoped for.34
On 4 January the men from Grom and Zenit were loaded into a slow turboprop plane and flew—endlessly, it seemed—until they finally reached Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan. They had no documents of any kind and no money. At the airport they were met by a colonel of the frontier guards, who had heard nothing of their arrival. There was a bad moment until they convinced him who they were. The wounded were then sent to hospital in Tashkent. The rest went on to Moscow. Here they were received with honour, but told that they were in no circumstances to talk about what they had done, and made to sign a secrecy agreement. The secrecy was such that medals—not as many as the men had hoped for—were handed out in hugger-mugger. Colonel Boyarinov, who had been killed by friendly fire, was posthumously made a Hero of the Soviet Union. Kryuchkov went in secret to his Moscow apartment to give the medal personally to his wife and son.35
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