ABSTRACT
When Soviet troops seized the main centres of Afghanistan on Christmas Day, 1979, there were those who saw it as proof that after the years of detente, the USSR was once again on the offensive. Headlines spoke of 'the empire striking back', of 'red legions on the march'. At the same time, a relatively unknown Party administrator from the sleepy and prosperous region of Stavropol had just been brought onto the Politburo, albeit as a non-voting member. Eventually, after Mikhail Gorbachev had become the Party's General Secretary, his decision to withdraw his troops from this 'bleeding wound' was to leave one of the most striking series of visual images of his revolution, proof not only that the USSR was no irresistible military colossus, but that its goal, far from expansion, was simple survival. The regime that was left in Kabul managed to outlive Gorbachev's Soviet Union, but not by long, and as of writing, the same guns and rockets are being used in civil war, not only in Afghanistan but in former Soviet Moldova, Tajikistan and Georgia. The war seems not so much to have 'Sovietised' Afghanistan as 'Afghanised' the whole USSR.
