A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan

by Artemy M. Kalinovsky

The conflict in Afghanistan looms large in the collective consciousness of Americans. What has the United States achieved, and how will it withdraw without sacrificing those gains? The Soviet Union confronted these same questions in the 1980s, and Artemy Kalinovsky’s history of the USSR’s nine-year struggle to extricate itself from Afghanistan and bring its troops home provides a sobering perspective on exit options in the region.

What makes Kalinovsky’s intense account both timely and important is its focus not on motives for initiating the conflict but on the factors that prevented the Soviet leadership from ending a demoralizing war. Why did the USSR linger for so long, given that key elites recognized the blunder of the mission shortly after the initial deployment?

Newly available archival material, supplemented by interviews with major actors, allows Kalinovsky to reconstruct the fierce debates among Soviet diplomats, KGB officials, the Red Army, and top Politburo figures. The fear that withdrawal would diminish the USSR’s status as leader of the Third World is palpable in these disagreements, as are the competing interests of Afghan factions and the Soviet Union’s superpower rival in the West. This book challenges many widely held views about the actual costs of the conflict to the Soviet leadership, and its findings illuminate the Cold War context of a military engagement that went very wrong, for much too long.

Genres: History, Soviet Union, Russia, Nonfiction

320 pages, Hardcover

First published June 4, 2011

About the author

Artemy M. Kalinovsky is Assistant Professor in the European Studies Department at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands

Reviews

[Lynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

The only thing that annoys me about this book is that the blurb (above) focuses on Americans. The book is about the Soviets in Afghanistan. It probably has lessons the US could stand to learn, but the US doesn't listen to anyone else anyway, so why even mention it?

Other than that, and a tendency to be slightly repetitive in places, it's a very interesting book. I've read quite a bit about the Afghan war from the perspective of the military and ordinary soldiers, but this is the first book I've come across that deals with what was going on in the Kremlin, the thought processes and power struggles there that largely determined how things played out. Some of that cannot of course be known, but since the fall of the USSR, archives have occasionally opened up, at least temporarily, which allowed the author access to information we simply wouldn't have otherwise.

[Matthew · Rating 3 out of 5]

A Long goodbye is a functional, but highly limited, work of diplomatic history. A Long goodbye centers on the process by which the elite of the Soviet Union decided to withdraw from the war in Afghanistan, and their failed efforts to secure favorable terms. The book focuses primarily on the decision making and thought process of a small number of actors, Brezhnev, Andropov, Gorbachev, a few senior diplomats, and the leaders of the armed forces and the KGB. Kalinovsky argues the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan, and the process to the withdraw, were shaped little by the realities of the war, and almost entirely by domestic and other foreign policy concerns. Their goals shifted in service of new domestic and foreign policy objectives, with the Union's attitudes towards the war or the cost of the war mattering little. Despite originally envisioning a friendly communist state on their border, Soviet objectives evolved to simply a non-hostile state in response to a pressing need to eliminate the war as a diplomatic and political albatross around the neck of the Soviet leadership.

As an elite focused diplomatic history, the book is functional. The author draws effectively on the myriad of private and public diplomatic communications, memoirs, and reports that surrounded the Soviet war in Afghanistan. By keeping a narrow focus on a few elites, Kalinovsky is able to go into great detail on how the personal characteristics of elites shaped the war. He also does an excellent job of summarizing the contradictory objectives of the Soviets which perpetuated the war. Despite near universal agreement the war should have ended quickly, the Soviets were unable to do so while also achieving their goals of: a 1. Soviet Friendly government 2. An end to great power involvement in Afghanistan 3. A stable Afghanistan regime 4. Proving that the Soviets would never abandon their allies or client states in the third world 5. Ending their military conflict with the USA over the third world. To achieve all of these goals was impossible, so the war continued until the goal of improving relations with the USA outweighed their other objectives.

I found it interesting how Kalinovsky identified that ideology played little to no role in the continuation of the war. Instead he argues Soviet involvement was purely a problem of real politiks. The Soviets didn't want a hostile state on their border, unless they got something of equal value in exchange. Indeed so committed were they to simply removing the threat of a hostile Afghanistan, they actively discouraged communism in Afghanistan, instead encouraging the communist government to embrace religion, nationalism, and the free market.

What harms this book is ultimately that is is utterly divorced from the conduct of the war, and fails to integrate the history of the war into the broader context of Soviet history. While Kalinovsky does connect the end of the war with detentee, and the "new thinking", he fails to explore the relationship in enough detail for it to be particularly insightful as a connection. Likewise, he fails to cover the growing internal pressure against the war adequately, or the views of other communist and non-aligned powers on the war. The role of the army and civil service are also downplayed, as are how both groups, and the Afghanistan government, sought to perpetuate the idea that the war could be won.

Ultimately this is a book of interest only to true students of diplomatic history who enjoy it at an individual focused level.

[Michael Griswold · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Soviet Union’s ten year war in Afghanistan (1979-89) is a vastly understudied conflict due to uneven to non-existent access to the Soviet archives and the generally undesirability of doing research in Afghanistan. Artemy Kalinovsky has done as well as anyone to date at piecing together the contentious political conflict within the Soviet leadership as the Soviet Union first invaded and then became bogged down in sands of Afghanistan.

I thought it was really interesting in that I had this perhaps misguided belief that the leadership apparatus in the USSR was monolithic. Instead, much like portraits painted of American decision-making in Afghanistan, there were multiple voices on both sides of any major decision the Soviets undertook in Afghanistan from getting in to how much they supported the pro- Soviet government on withdraw.

Is all the detail that one might want present? No, but remember that Kalinovsky is working within some pretty serious constraints as noted above. I thought that given the constraints, the effort was more than fair.

[Janet Pawlowski · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent account of Gorbachev administration handling of the actual withdrawal process

[Phil Baki · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantastic information even if it was at times organized in a seemingly repetitive manner. As someone who is in Afghanistan currently it drew so many parallels to the current situation.