The Bleeding Wound: The Soviet War in Afghanistan and the Collapse of the Soviet System by Yaacov Ro’i

Abstract

This author’s prolific scholarship combines nuanced argumentation with an encylopedic knowledge of late-socialist Soviet society, notably in the realms of foreign relations, nationalities policy, and religion. In this exhaustively researched book, Ro’i turns his attention to the Soviet–Afghan War (1979–1989), a conflict that Eduard Shevardnadze, the USSR’s last foreign minister, termed “a sin” in a 1990 speech to the Supreme Soviet (115). Although a number of excellent monographs on the subject have been published in recent years, Ro’i offers something new. In 1992/3, when a conflict that killed at least 15,000 Soviet soldiers and more than a million Afghans was recent news, he and a small team of interviewers conducted surveys and interviews with hundreds of former Soviet citizens, most of them war veterans, across eleven Soviet republics and among emigrés in Israel. Incorporating elements of qualitative and quantitative data and analysis, the result is a source base rich and unique in its combination of detail and raw emotion.The Bleeding Wound is a magisterial survey of the war’s intersection with important trends in the Soviet 1980s. The assessment of Russian political scientist Dmitrii Ol’shanskii whom Ro’i quotes at the outset summarizes the book’s argument: “The truth about Afghanistan emerges only in a polyphony of varying points of view grounded in authentic knowledge” (5). Ro’i seeks to study “the ways that the war encompassed various aspects of late Soviet government and society” through the lens of “a number of topics that were of paramount importance in the 1980s” (306)—official (civilian and military) attitudes toward the various stages of the war, the behavior and treatment of Soviet soldiers, ethnic relations in the Red Army, Soviet popular culture, veterans (afgantsy), and glasnost’. The book is organized according to ten thematic chapters, two providing a detailed chronology, three focusing on the military, and two engaging with media and public opinion. The final three chapters analyze the challenges confronting returning afgantsy, the position of Central Asian Muslims in the Red Army, and the political activity of afgantsy during and after the Soviet collapse.One area in which the book breaks new ground concerns its focus on Central Asian Muslims. Historically speaking, the Central Asian republics and Afghanistan hold much in common. The long-standing conventional wisdom is that the Soviet leadership sought to capitalize on these affinities by deploying Central Asian soldiers in the initial part of the war, only to pull them back because they were too sympathetic to locals, too Muslim, or insufficiently “internationalist.” Ro’i’s interviews and survey data allow him to paint a more complex picture. For example, his Central Asian respondents rated the need to intervene in Afghanistan much higher than did Russians, other Slavs, and Muslims from Russia and the Caucasus. In the early part of the war, 56 percent of Central Asian subjects affirmed the USSR’s “need” to intervene, compared to 31 percent of Russians (169). By contrast, in the same period, Central Asians scored lowest on the “moral right” to intervene compared to the same groups (173). Results like this one lead Ro’i to highlight the limitations of such surveys, and to rely instead on interviews with forty-four veterans and fifty civilians from the region. He identifies racism and Islamophobia as reasons behind doubt (in the USSR and Washington) about the Central Asians’ patriotism (260): “Careful scrutiny of the evidence demands that we refrain from drawing conclusions about widespread Central Asian disloyalty to the Soviet Union (261).” Rather than making sweeping generalizations, Ro’i brings his Central Asian informants to life by skillfully deploying colorful vignettes, such as one about a Tajik soldier who met Afghans who had known his parents. These and other accounts help to lighten the mood of a work that can make for harrowing reading (260).Jam-packed as it is with data and dense analysis, The Bleeding Wound may intimidate non-specialist readers. But Ro’i’s gift for weaving a galaxy of sources, and many different methodologies, into one elegant narrative, makes this book unique. It is both an excellent introduction for the more intrepid general reader and, more obviously, a key reference work about the Afghan War and the Soviet 1980s.