ABSTRACT
The contrast between the phlegmatic young veteran and factory worker and the smart young student in his Levi SOls and Adidas sweat shirt encapsulates so much about the war. Both of an age, both Russian, both even living within walking distance of the same metro station, they nevertheless were, socially and politically, continents apart. For while the war soon brought forth a response from the (self-)consciously freethinking urban intelligentsia, it took years of fighting and dying, the slow diffusion of veterans in society and glasnost' to begin to make Afghanistan an issue for the wider public, first through press coverage and the more general intrusion of the war into Soviet culture. With few exceptions, though, general public attitudes were either irrelevant or moulded by the concerns of political, social and cultural elites. They used Afghanistan as an idiom and a weapon to forward reform in five main areas: 'reclaiming' Russian and Soviet history; redefining relations with Islam; and an interlocked trinity of reassessments, of the ends of the USSR's foreign policy, the means by which it should attain them and the procedures whereby that policy should be formulated. In most instances, this happened with the active support of the Gorbachev regime. However, it did so in the context of a decay in the legitimacy of the regime and the cohesion of the elites, and thus became idiom and contributory factor for these processes, too. In some small measure, at least, Brezhnev's decision to deploy troops in Afghanistan brought about the downfall of his and his successors' USSR.
