35 years ago, on February 15, 1989, the last Soviet soldier left the Afghan soil — the war was lost. From the beginning, the population of the USSR did not understand what the war was for, they suffered for almost 10 years and accepted the withdrawal of the troops with relief. Such was the objective reality then.
Many veterans of the Soviet-Afghan war came to the defence of Ukraine back in 2014 and today they faithfully defend their native land from the Russian invaders. They well remember how much pain and losses this senseless war brought to the Ukrainian people enslaved by the Russian-Soviet empire.
It is not difficult to guess that “by the way” the perception of this date is diametrically opposite. On this occasion, they have another attack of “victory-obsessed”. On the occasion of the 35th anniversary of the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, Russian propaganda spreads the thesis that “the Russian Federation did not lose in Afghanistan and will be the winner on its own”.
Soviet propaganda also told for 10 years that “everything is idiotic according to plan”. In fact, everything was wrong. And maybe not as the Kremlin propagandists would like, everything in today’s Russia?
The Afghan war, as you know, was the last of the great imperial adventures of the Soviet Union.
As is well known from history, every such “foreign” adventure, if it did not bring lightning success, led to the overthrow of the government. But how fast did it happen?
At the time of the beginning of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the Soviet Central Committee, Brezhnev was 73 years old, Chernenko was 68, Andropov was 65, Ustinov was 71, Kosygin was 75, Suslov was 77. It was clear from the beginning that this whole venture was ineffective and doomed to failure. Already in the spring of 1981, talks began about the need to withdraw troops from Afghanistan.
But “Afghan” was in a certain sense existential for the USSR.
Despite the unpopularity of the war and the fact that during that time as many as three secretaries of the USSR died, the Soviet leadership recognized the failure of its imperial project only in the tenth year of the invasion.
Putin and his senile marasmatic clique are now literally aping the Soviets in everything. The age structure of the Russian “tsk”, which has also been in power for two decades, is now as follows: Putin will be 72, Shoigu – 69, Patrushev – 73, Bortnikov – 73, Lavrov – 74, Matvienko – 75.
The war in Ukraine became existential for the Kremlin leader and his entourage.
Yes, it will end. The most rhetorical question is when?
The war with Ukraine has been a “background” for the Russians for almost 10 years. A large part of the country called Russia does not want to know anything about the war, as well as about what the Russian government is doing in general.
And the fact that there are no successes in this war actually only increases the general indifference. But it also shows that as long as Putin and his criminal henchmen rule Russia, he will do whatever he wants. And he is unlikely to want to withdraw troops.
In addition, due to the constant strengthening of repressions, Russians have a completely motivated fear of the authorities, and it is unlikely that “civil society” will begin to put pressure on the authorities there. You should not hope for this.
In the late USSR, there was no such fear and brainwashing as there is in modern Russia. That is why in the 1980s dissatisfaction with the war was visible to the naked eye. When the perestroika and “glasnost” began, only the lazy did not express their opinion about “Afghan”. And rarely was this opinion in unison with official propaganda.
Discontent was reinforced by typical tombstones with images of young people in military uniforms in many cemeteries without information about the circumstances of their deaths. After all, there was no official data on the losses of the Soviet army at all. Even today, different sources give figures that differ several times.
Today, Russians also do not talk about their losses. But, for example, in Bashkortostan, it was calculated that during the two years of the war in Ukraine, 10 times more servicemen from the Salavat district of the republic died than during the 10 years of the war in Afghanistan.
When the troops were withdrawn from Afghanistan, the army understood that this was only the beginning of further processes. Russian troops will have to be withdrawn from Ukraine sooner or later. That is why the Russians are now so desperately clinging to the territories they have already captured and are trying to at least bite off a little bit more in order to preserve the illusion of “their success”, which, for obvious reasons, was doomed from the very beginning.
Last year, Prigozhin’s rebellion showed that Putin’s Russia is a sham that no one in the Russian Federation will regret. And that gives hope. After all, in the case of a recurrence of such a crisis, this system will not survive.
I also want to believe that, as in the late 1980s, there is a certain critical mass of people at the lower levels of Russian society who look at the current reality differently and will be ready to wash the blood off the Russian flag…
Eugene Bouquet
АрміяInform
