Afgantsy is the Russian term for the Soviet soldiers who fought the war, and Braithwaite recounts many of their individual stories with special empathy.

“Sir Rodric Braithwaite has produced what will become the definitive account in English of the Soviet experience in Afghanistan, from the time in autumn 1979 that the gerontocrats in the politburo reluctantly agreed to accede to Afghan requests to intervene, against the Russians’ better judgment, to Gorbachev’s decision to staunch the “bleeding wound” and withdraw nearly 10 years later.” The Guardian.

In reading the book what came across most strongly, however, is his humanity. In every chapter, we feel his sympathy for the suffering that the intervention brought for tens of thousands of Soviet citizens, and for scores of thousands of wretched Afghans. Yet, as Braithwaite points out in his epilogue, for all the agonies that the Afghanistan episode brought a dying Soviet Union, it was, in Soviet terms, a relatively small war. And Russia has managed, more or less, to bind its wounds and move on.

The Soviet war in Afghanistan, which began in December 1979 and ended a little more than nine years later, remains a painful chapter in former Soviets’ collective memory. It hastened the bankruptcy and 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. After Russia, Ukraine suffered the second-largest losses from the war, with at least 2,500 dead soldiers and thousands more wounded.

The toll on Afghanistan, meanwhile, was horrific: One million people were killed, the country’s agriculture was destroyed and a third of its population fled, creating the largest single-country refugee crisis the world had then known — not to mention that Moscow’s invasion sparked a cycle of violence that continues today.

I thoroughly recommend this book to any one interested in modern conflicts.

Footnote:

There is evidence of the return of the Afgantsy in the current Ukraine conflict where the middle-aged and battled-hardened, but veterans of the Soviet war in Afghanistan are back on the front lines in Ukraine.

Fighting on both sides, and despite their age, for many Afgantsy, the nearly 8-year-old Ukraine conflict, which has killed almost 9,000 people and displaced at least 1.4 million, is a natural next step. It is their third war in at least 25 years, with the 1990s Chechen wars sandwiched in between. The middle-aged fighters’ hardened reserve, combined with much-needed combat experience, makes them desirable in a conflict defined by poverty and incompetence, in which recruits on both sides have been accused of robbery, drug-dealing and hard drinking.