ABSTRACT
The war's impact on Afghanistan was as obvious as it was horrifying, a land littered with burnt-out hulks of tanks and unexploded mines, a nation half refugee abroad. The impact on the USSR and Russia is harder to quantify, but beyond the relative handful of war-wounded and bereaved, the question inevitably arises as to the extent to which the war influenced the politics of the 1980s, the rise of the Andropovian and then Gorbachevian approaches to reform, the flowering of perestroika and the withering of the whole Soviet system. Did Afghanistan feed into, even trigger, these changes, or was it overshadowed by grander or more pressing concerns, from the fragmentation of the elite to hunger in the cities?
