SOVIET INVASION OF AFGHANISTAN A CASE OF MISSION CREEP, ACCORDING TO NEW BOOK AND ORIGINAL SOVIET DOCUMENTS
THE DEAD END PUBLISHED IN ENGLISH FOR THE FIRST TIME
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 396
Posted - October 13, 2012
Edited by Svetlana Savranskaya and Malcolm Byrne
For more information contact:
Svetlana Savranskaya - 202/994-7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu
Washington, DC, October 13, 2012 –
Contrary to U.S. myths of a strategic Soviet offensive towards
warm water ports on the Persian Gulf or Indian Ocean, it
was "mission creep" that led the Soviet Union into its ill-fated
invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, according to a new, richly documented account of early
Soviet engagement in Afghanistan, published in English and in Russian
today by the National Security Archive at www.nsarchive.org.
The groundbreaking book by two Russian authors - the historian and
journalist Vladimir Snegirev and the veteran of Soviet foreign
intelligence Valery
Samunin - appears today in English under the title The Dead End: The Road to Afghanistan,
together with 21 key documents from the National
Security Archive's collection of Soviet and U.S. secret files on the
Soviet war in Afghanistan and seven historic photographs from the
period immediately
before the invasion.
The Archive's posting of the Russian original, Virus A: How We Got Infected by the Invasion of Afghanistan, appears on our Russian Page.
It includes more than 150 original. Russian-language documents from Soviet-era files gathered by the
Archive - most of which are not available in Moscow archives today - and
42 photographs
from the period that were obtained by the authors. This book,
defined by the authors as a "political investigation," traces the
process of the gradual
Soviet engagement in the Afghan revolutionary process over the years
1978 and 1979, eventually culminating in the invasion of December 1979.
The authors
reconstruct the history of Soviet involvement on the basis of
archival documents and extensive interviews with key participants
ranging from top Afghan
Communists to the late Ahmad Shah Masood to former KGB chief
Vladimir Kryuchkov and Soviet ambassador A.M. Puzanov.
During the glasnost years of the late 1980s, Vladimir Snegirev wrote the
first investigative stories published in the Soviet Union (in Komsomolskaya Pravda and Rossiyskaya Gazeta)
about the invasion of Afghanistan, and has been pursuing this hidden
history for the past 25
years. Retired KGB colonel Valery Samunin served in Afghanistan for
more than seven years as a foreign intelligence officer, and applied his
knowledge and
contacts to develop Snegirev's investigation into a panoramic
history of the decisionmaking that led to the disastrous Soviet
intervention in 1979.
The authors of the book and the National Security Archive would like
to express their gratitude to the Carnegie Corporation of New York,
which provided
funding for the translation of the manuscript, and to the expert
translator who carried out this work, Anna Vassilieva.
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