Soviet Hearts-and-Minds Operations in Afghanistan

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S O V I E T H E A R T S - A N D - M I N D S

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In a 2007 article in the Globe and Mail, a former Soviet soldier, Nikolai Lanine,wrote how “[d]uring my first mission [in Afghanistan], we were protecting refu-gees escaping an area that was under mujahideen attack . . . [i]n my mind ourpresence was ‘helping Afghans’ particularly with educating women and children[and m]y combat unit participated in ‘humanitarian aid’: accompanying doctorsand delivering food, fuel, clothing, school and other supplies to Afghan villages.”1

Lanine’s experience may not have been typical, but it was more common than isgenerally understood.

Since 2001, the US-led counter-insurgency war in Afghanistan has generated arenewed interest in the Soviet experience against Afghan resistance in the 1980s.Most articles and books on the subject concentrate almost exclusively on thecombat operations of the Limited Contingent of Soviet Forces in Afghanistan(LCSFA). The most recent English-language history of the subject, Gregory Feif-er’s 2008 book The Great Gamble, mentions on one page that “Moscow sentthousands of economic advisers to oversee major new construction projects,including the building of hospitals and power stations and expansion of Kabulairport,” but then says no more and spends the rest of its 300 or so pagesrecounting combat operations.2 This is fairly typical of the existing literature onthe Soviet involvement in Afghanistan, both for Soviet/Russian studies and forthose produced in the West.3

Paul Robinson is a professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at theUniversity of Ottawa. His publications include Military Honour and the Conduct of War(London: Routledge, 2006) and The White Russian Army in Exile, 1920–1941 (Oxford: OxfordUP, 2002). He would like to thank Alfia Sorokina for her excellent work in locating Sovietmaterials for this article.

1. Nikolai Lanine, “We’re Still Dying in Afghanistan,” Globe and Mail, 30 November 2006,available at http://www.vigile.net/we-re-still-dying-in-Afghanistan, accessed 7 January 2010.

2. Gregory Feifer, The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan (New York: Harper, 2009),146.

3. For a comment to this effect, see Anton Minkov and Gregory Smolynec, Economic Develop-ment in Afghanistan During the Soviet Period, 1979–1989: Lessons Learned from the SovietExperience in Afghanistan (Ottawa: DRDC Centre for Operational Research and Analysis,2007), 1.

© 2010 Phi Alpha Theta

This article describes the investments made by the Soviet Army in hearts-and-minds operations in Afghanistan in the 1980s.4 It shows that for most of thisperiod hearts-and-minds operations were in fact small-scale and uncoordinated.They were a distinct afterthought to other military operations rather than anintegrated part of an overall strategy to win the support of the Afghan population.By 1987 and 1988, however, Soviet thinking and practice had evolved. TheSoviets sought to stabilize Afghanistan through a multi-pronged strategy whichinvolved political reform, the withdrawal of the LCSFA, and increased economicand humanitarian aid. As part of this, some Soviet commanders began to realizethe importance of hearts-and-minds operations, and the scale of such operationsundertaken by LCSFA units increased.

This essay will argue that these operations probably did not achieve muchsuccess. The Soviets neither managed to coordinate the various tools they used,nor produced a proper doctrine for doing so. Too many hearts and minds hadbeen lost through brutality by elements of the Soviet Army in the first few yearsof the occupation for any meaningful number of people to be won over througha softer approach towards the end of the decade. Nevertheless, hearts-and-mindsoperations did take place on a larger scale than is generally understood. Byignoring that these efforts were undertaken at all, historians have missed theopportunity to explain this failure, and also to explain why the experience failedto take hold in Soviet military thinking. In examining these issues, the articleattempts to broaden our understanding of the causes of Soviet failures inAfghanistan.

Most Western writers create a general impression that the LCSFA did notengage in hearts-and-minds operations at all. One exception to this is AntonioGiustozzi, who mentions briefly the work of Soviet agitprop units in his book War,Politics, and Society in Afghanistan.5 Even such brief mentions are, however, rare.On the whole, analyses of the LCSFA’s operations follow a predictable path. Theprevailing attitude of Western commentators is expressed by a contemporaryobserver, American diplomat J. Bruce Amstutz, who wrote in the mid-1980s that“[b]y 1982 the Soviets seemingly had abandoned any attempt to win the heartsand minds of the Afghan public [; . . . f]ood stocks, wheat fields, livestock, andwater wells systematically were destroyed so that the local population, deprived of

4. It is worth emphasizing that the focus here is exclusively on actions of the Soviet Army, not onsimilar activity undertaken by Soviet civilians, such as the provision of economic and technicalassistance. The latter will form the subject of a separate study.

5. Antonio Giustozzi, War, Politics and Society in Afghanistan, 1978–1992 (London: C. Hurst,2000), 41.

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the means of survival, would be forced to move away.”6 More recently, Britishauthor Martin Ewans agreed that the Soviets did not attempt any type of “hearts-and-minds strategy”:

Instead, they simply did their best to depopulate the countryside by attack-ing civilians in the villages in which they lived. . . . When the population fledinto the hills to escape them, they employed a ‘scorched earth’ policy,destroying buildings, animals, crops and irrigation systems, and killedanyone who had been left behind. When they departed, they left booby trapsbehind them. Sometimes they simply carpetbombed villages and valleys.7

Soviet strategy has been described as “migratory genocide.”8 “The SovietArmy,” claims Ahmed Rashid, “relied on massive firepower to kill and maimAfghans rather than winning their hearts and minds.”9

The memoirs of Soviet generals tell a different story, however, that does notmention deliberate policies to attack civilians. While the generals do recall effortsto find a political solution to Afghanistan’s problems, only in the case of a fewexceptions, such as the memoirs of Generals Varennikov and Liakhovskii, dohearts-and-minds operations receive any attention.10 Yet, after the LCSFA’s depar-ture from Afghanistan in February 1989, Major General Gelii Batenin, who wasthen attached to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the SovietUnion, claimed that “[o]ne third of our military contingent—that is, the sapperand transportation units and battalions—discharged what essentially were purelypeaceful functions: building houses, hospitals, roads, and wells, and transportingfoodstuffs and other essentials to the population.”11 Evidence for these operationscan be found in Soviet press reports: Although somewhat patchy, they do enable

6. J. Bruce Amstutz, Afghanistan: The First Five Years of Soviet Occupation (Washington, DC:National Defense University, 1986), 145.

7. Martin Ewans, Afghanistan: A Short History of Its People and Politics (New York: Perennial,2001), 221.

8. Mark Galeotti, Afghanistan: The Soviet Union’s Last War (London: Frank Cass, 1995), 17.

9. Ahmed Rashid, “Graveyard of Analogies,” The National, 30 January 2009 (available at:http://www.thenational.ae/article/20090130/REVIEW/458735663/1008, accessed 15 August2009).

10. See A. A. Liakhovskii, Tragediia i doblest’ Afgana (Moscow: GPI Iskona, 1995); V. Varen-nikov, Nepovtorimoe, 7 vols (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 2001–02).

11. Interview in Mlada Fronta (Prague), 17 February 1989, 5, as reported in Foreign BroadcastInformation Service (henceforth FBIS), International Affairs, FBIS-SOV-89-037, 27 February1989, 49.

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one to sketch the outlines of what Soviet units did.12 These illustrate that Soviethearts-and-minds operations did take place and involved both humanitarianassistance and efforts to assist in economic reconstruction. The number of reportsof such activities is notably higher in the later 1980s. While this might reflectsomething different, such as changing reporting priorities, it does neverthelessprovide support for the thesis that the tempo of such operations increased in thefinal years of the Soviet occupation.

Cold War narratives continue to shape, and mis-shape, our understanding ofthe Soviet presence in Afghanistan. Now that Western states find themselves in aposition somewhat similar to the previous Soviet one, cracks are beginning toappear in these narratives. As an editorial in the Washington Times noted inFebruary 2009, “[c]ontrary to popular belief, the Soviet Union did not relyexclusively on military power in their Afghan war . . . [a] close reading of theSoviet counterinsurgency strategy shows that they avidly pursued politicalreforms, economic development, infrastructure improvements, education and allthe other elements of what is now ‘smart power’.”13 Indeed, we may agree that thefocus on the LCSFA’s combat operations and the destruction these wrought hascreated a one-sided view of the LCSFA’s activities. However limited and uncoor-dinated they were, hearts-and-minds operations did take place, and examining thecauses of their failure contributes to our understanding of the Soviet experience inAfghanistan in the 1980s.

Mao Zedong famously remarked that guerrillas are like fish which swim in thesea.14 The sea is the civilian population, which provides the guerrillas with thesupport they need to survive. Counterinsurgency theory thus demands thatthe state catch the fish from the sea: It needs to separate the insurgents from thepopulation. This can be done in a purely physical, and usually crude and brutal,fashion, simply by driving the population off its land. This was one of thestrategies used by the British Army during the Second South African (Boer) War

12. On the whole Soviet press reports appear reliable, at least in the sense that one can generallyverify that the things they say were done actually were done. They mislead less by what theysay than by what they do not say. Thus, for instance, if a Soviet press report claims that theSoviets built a power line in Afghanistan, this may create a false impression of progress bynot mentioning the many other power lines that had been destroyed, but the basic claim thata power line was built is probably true.

13. “Editorial: Lessons From Soviets in Afghanistan,” Washington Times, 18 February 2009(available at: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/feb/18/lessons-from-soviets-in-afghanistan, accessed 10 September 2009).

14. Mao Zedong, On Guerilla Warfare, trans S.B. Griffith (Champaign, IL: U. of Illinois P.,2000; original Chinese edition: 1937), 93.


at the very beginning of the twentieth century: The British burned farmhouses anddepopulated rural areas. An alternative method, more in tune with modernliberal-democratic leanings, is to deprive insurgents of popular support by pro-viding the people with benefits which the insurgents cannot match, such assecurity, employment, or social services.

Today’s counterinsurgency theory suggests that it is best to combine elementsof both methods, pairing more precise military action with social, economic,diplomatic, and propaganda endeavors which will win hearts and minds.Counterinsurgency doctrine in most Western countries thus emphasizes what thegovernment of Canada calls a “Whole of Government Approach”: This findsexpression in a host of acronyms, all of which express the sense that militarypower must be combined with economic and other forms of power to producesuccess, for instance: DDD (Defense, Diplomacy, and Development); DIME(Diplomacy, Information, Military, Economics); and PMESII (Political, Military,Economic, Social, Infrastructure, and Information). As the US Army’s fieldmanual on counter insurgency says, counterinsurgency “involves the applicationof national power in the political, military, economic, social, information, andinfrastructure fields and disciplines.”15

Even if the Soviet Army was structured to fight a major war against otherstates, it did not lack counterinsurgency experience. Soviet troops had foughtguerrilla uprisings in Russia during the Civil War from 1918 to 1921, and by 1931had successfully defeated the forces of the basmachi in Central Asia.16 After theSecond World War, they also conducted a long campaign against Ukrainiannationalist insurgents.17 The struggle against anti-communist guerrillas in the1920s had impressed upon Soviet leaders the importance of combining militaryand non-military measures in counter insurgency operations. Thus, although theSoviet Army used brutal methods including poisonous gas and the taking ofhostages, it also enacted political and economic reforms, building in part onLenin’s New Economic Policy, introduced in 1921, which reduced much of thediscontent that produced support for the insurgents. For instance, in CentralAsia “the Bolshevik authorities in the region gave increased freedom to the

15. Headquarters, Department of the Army, Counterinsurgency, FM3-24, Washington, DC:Department of the Army, 2006, 1-1.

16. See for example Alexander Marshall, “Turkfront: Frunze and the Development of SovietCounter-Insurgency in Central Asia,” in Tom Everett-Heath, ed., Central Asia: Aspects ofTransition (New York: Routledge, 2003), 5–29.

17. See for example K. Boterbloem, The Life and Times of Andrei Zhdanov, 1896–1948(Montreal-Kingston: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2004), 274, 479n177.


population . . . special tax deductions for land transactions . . . permitted thereturn of Shari’a law . . . created a variety of opportunities for small manufacturesand traders . . . [and] also increased freedom of travel along the railroadnetwork.”18

Building on these experiences, General Mikhail Tukhachevskii drew conclu-sions which strongly echo modern counter insurgency theorists’ demand for“population-centric” strategy and a “whole of government approach.” In 1922,Tukhachevskii wrote the article “The Eradication of Banditry,” in which he statedthat “consistent and skilful implementation of a new economic policy in banditlocalities creates significant chances of rapid success in the eradication of banditry[, while t]hese actions absolutely must be accompanied by a strengthened agita-tional campaign, explaining and popularizing our policies.”19 And in his 1926article “The Struggle with Counterrevolutionary Uprisings,” Tukhachevskii wrotethat, “[i]n regions of a firmly rooted uprising one must conduct not battles andoperations . . . but rather a whole form of war. . . . In a word, the struggle must bewaged not primarily with the rebel bands, but with the entire local population.”20

By the late 1940s, governed by the less flexible regime of Joseph Stalin (whohad Tukhachevskii executed in 1937), and fresh from its victory over NaziGermany, the Soviet Army’s approach towards counter insurgency in Ukraine wasrather different. The Soviets chose to “overlook non-coercive—informational,economic, and administrative—instruments of power.”21 “The Soviet experiencein Ukraine was characterised by a disproportionate reliance on the militaryinstrument of power.”22 The lessons of the 1920s were forgotten.

Nothing between then and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 causedSoviet leaders to relearn these lessons. As a result, the Soviet Army arrived inAfghanistan with no doctrine for counter insurgency operations and no institu-tional memory of how to deal with unconventional warfare. As General A.A.

18. John P. Riordan, Red DIME: Dissecting the Bolshevik Liquidation Campaign in the Fer-ghana Valley against the Basmachi Resistance (Fort Leavenworth, KS: School of AdvancedMilitary Studies, 2008), 9.

19. Mikhail Tukhachevskii, “Iskorenie banditizma,” Voina i Revolutsiia 16, 1922, cited in IuliiaKantor, Voina i mir Mikhaila Tukhachevskogo (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Ogonek, 2005), 264.

20. Mikhail Tukhachevskii, “Bor’ba s kontrrevoliutsionnymi vosstaniiami,” Voina i Revolutsiia7, 1926, cited in Kantor, Voina, 257.

21. Yuri Zhukov, “Examining the Authoritarian Model of Counter-Insurgency: The SovietCampaign Against the Ukrainian Insurgent Army,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 3, 2007,439–466, 450.

22. Ibid., 453.


Liakhovskii later wrote, “[a]lthough the theoretical military training of officers ingeneral was high, it was oriented to traditional forms of fighting battles, withoutconsidering the specifics of local conditions and the methods of partisan war, thestudy of which had not had sufficient attention previously.”23

This helps to explain many of the tactical failings of the LCFSA during its yearsin Afghanistan as well as the excessive violence it regularly used. By 1985,however, some Soviet officers had already become aware of the need for a differentapproach. This included many of those in the most important positions. In June1985, for instance, General V.I. Varennikov, who represented the Soviet Ministryof Defense in Afghanistan as head of its “Operational Group,” wrote to theMinister of Defence, Marshal S.L. Sokolov, that “[e]veryone recognizes that wecannot resolve the issues of the April revolution by military means.”24 Operationsto clear areas of mujahideen rebels were often counterproductive, Varennikovclaimed: “The point is that all Afghans are used to protecting their lands . . . in theregion where an operation was carried out to cleanse it of bandit formations, oftenthere weren’t any bandits, and the male population, when we came with guns andtanks, began to defend their land.”25 Sokolov in turn echoed Varennikov’s com-plaint, telling the Politburo in January 1987 that “[t]his kind of war cannot bewon by means of military force.” The Politburo agreed. “We cannot bring themfreedom by military means,” said Politburo member Egor Ligachev, “[w]e havealready lost by trying to do that.”26

By 1987, many Soviet commanders had come to realize that winning thesupport of the people was the key to the successful prosecution of the war.Consequently, they sought to minimize military operations, both to reduce theirown casualties27 and to reduce damage to the Afghan population. Another Sovietgeneral, M.A. Gareev, commented:

[O]ften senseless bombing and rocket artillery strikes had little effect froma military point of view. They only made the local population hostile to the

23. Liakhovskii, Tragediia, 163–4.

24. V.I. Varennikov, Nepovtorimoe, vol. 5, 203. The April or “Saur” Revolution brought thePDPA to power in April 1978.

25. Ibid, 172–3.

26. Anatolii Cherniaev, “The Afghanistan Problem,” Russian Politics and Law 5, 2004, 29–49:38.

27. In his memoirs General Gromov strongly expressed his desire to minimize military operationsso as to reduce Soviet casualties: B.V. Gromov, Ogranichenyi kontingent (Moscow: Progress,1994), 174, 196, 219.


Soviet and government forces without causing serious damage to the armedformations of the mujahideen, while simultaneously causing large casualtiesamong the peaceful population, the destruction of populated points, irriga-tion systems, crops and gardens.28

General Varennikov adds to this how “[i]n the Soviet forces the principlebecame stronger and stronger not to permit losses among the personnel of ourforces, to avoid sacrifices among the population.”29 We can therefore discern anevolution in Soviet military thinking away from a model that emphasized purelymilitary action and maximum force toward one which stressed minimum forceand the winning of the hearts and minds of the local population.

Because the Soviets entered Afghanistan with no counter insurgency doctrine,hearts-and-minds operations had a largely uncoordinated character and were,especially in the early 1980s, often the result of local initiatives rather thancentrally directed policy. Many stories from the early 1980s involved thede-mining of villages which had been mined and booby-trapped by the muja-hideen. A typical article in Sovetskaia Rossiia in March 1983 described the actionsof a Soviet military detachment which cleared 20 mines placed by the mujahideenin a village school. “The soldiers,” claimed the newspaper, “constantly come tothe aid of the local population.”30 Similarly, Moscow World Service broadcasteda report in August 1984 describing the actions of a dog-handler, Junior SergeantNikolai Svitsov, and his dog, Elsa, clearing mines from homes in an Afghanvillage. Svitsov and Elsa also removed fourteen mines “hidden in the walls andearthen floor” of the village school.31

The earlier report in Sovetskaia Rossiia also described another project under-taken by Soviet engineers in the mountain settlement of Kalay-Dala. Afterde-mining a village,

One of them, Sergeant Sabit Pugmanov, told his comrades of a wonderfulcustom existing from time immemorial back home in Uzbekistan. ‘Whensomeone in our settlements decides to build a home, all the people come to

28. M.A. Gareev, Afganskaia strada (s sovetskimi voiskami i bez nikh), second ed. (Moscow:Insan, 1999), 52.

29. Varennikov, Nepovtorimoe, 113.

30. Sovetskaia Rossiia, 12 March 1983, first edition, 3, in FBIS, USSR International Affairs, 17March 1983, D1.

31. Moscow World Service, 11 August 1984, in FBIS, USSR International Affairs, South Asia, 13August 1984, D3.


help without being asked. This is called khashar. And people work withoutpayment, from the goodness of their hearts.’ The entire company supportedthe sergeant who proposed to organize such a khashar in the Afghansettlement which had suffered heavily from the bandit attack. And workstarted. The walls of new homes grew like in a fairy tale. In one of themsmoke even started pouring from the chimney. It was the grateful hostswho had started to cook supper for all those on the building sites. Thusthey celebrated the new settlement together, Soviet soldiers and Afghanpeasants.32

Three important points emerge from these accounts. First, these activities weredistinctly small scale. Moreover, there are very few such episodes to be foundeither in the Soviet press or Soviet memoirs from the early 1980s. It is clear thattheir extent was very limited. Second, the humanitarian benefits of such activitieswere, by and large, incidental by-products of what were essentially militaryoperations rather than deliberate hearts-and-minds operations. De-mining, forinstance, served a military purpose—making villages and roads safer for Soviettroops—and the benefits to the villagers were merely incidental to that. And third,the initiative in the event described in Sovetskaia Rossiia came from a sergeant.While the order to de-mine the village had been given by higher authority, itclearly had not occurred to Sergeant Pugmanov’s superiors to make further use oftheir troops for hearts-and-minds purposes. Relying on such low-level initiative tosupport hearts and minds was never going to be sufficient. It confirms how duringthe early 1980s few senior officers regarded hearts and minds as a priority.

What was needed was something more organized. In due course this came inthe form of Soviet “agitprop” units. Each division, brigade, and regiment even-tually had one such unit. These would conduct non-combat “raids” in which theyentered an Afghan village, broadcast propaganda from loudspeakers, spoke tovillage elders to convince them to support the government, distributed foodstuffs,kerosene, and other material goods, and provided medical aid to villagers. A 1988article in Sotsialisticheskaia Industriia described a typical agitprop raid:

A raid with an agit detachment in a mountain village. This is the usual workof the twenty propagandists. Time after time they go out into Afghansettlements, in order to provide the inhabitants with products, to help thesick, and, above all, to tell them the truth about what is happening in the

32. Sovetskaia Rossiia, 12 March 1983, first edition, 3, in FBIS, USSR International Affairs, 17March 1983, D1.


country. . . . The boys waste no time. They turn on a loudspeaker. It broad-casts a communication about the loya jirga taking place in Kabul, and talksabout the policy of national reconciliation. They start to give out kerosene.. . . Nearby they give bread, salt, grain. Not far away the soldiers have putup a tent with a red cross. I look inside. An old man is complaining of aheadache. He receives a couple of boxes of aspirin.33

A similar description by a Soviet interpreter appears in Svetlana Alexievich’sbook Zinky Boys:

Afghan songs blare out from the loudspeakers, which even the Afghanscall ‘Alla Pugacheva’ [a universally popular Russian singer]. We soldiershang our visual propaganda materials from our vehicles—flags, posters,slogans—and unfurl a screen for the film show. The medics put up tablesand unpack their crates of medicines. A mullah in a long white robe and awhite turban comes forward to read a sura from the Koran. Then he turnsto Allah, begging him to protect believers from all the evils of the uni-verse. . . . The children do not listen to the speech—they’re waiting for thefilm. As usual, we have cartoons in English, followed by two documentariesin Farsi and Pashtu. . . . After the film show we distribute presents—today,toys and a bag of flour.34

Agitprop units appear to have begun as a local initiative, the first unit beingcreated by a Soviet political advisor, L.I. Shershnev, in 1981.35 Their initial scopeof activities was limited. Over time, they spread throughout the LCSFA, reachinga peak of activity in the years 1987–1988, when the Afghan governmentembarked on a new “National Reconciliation Program.” In the first four monthsof the program alone, agitprop units distributed 100,000 bars of soap, 17,000pairs of shoes, and other goods.36

Agitprop units were not the only ones giving aid to Afghan civilians. Sovietmedical units did so too. The official history of the war produced by the RussianGeneral Staff claimed that “Soviet medical services . . . constantly provided con-sultative assistance to the local population and provided laboratory services,

33. “Afganistan, god 1366-i,” Sotsialisticheskaia Industriia, 29 March 1988, 3.

34. Svetlana Alexievich, Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from a Forgotten War (London: Chatto &Windus, 1992), 143.

35. Giustozzi, War, 41.


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technical testing, electro-cardiograms, and X-ray examinations, as well as pro-viding local medical facilities with medications, Soviet-made materials, andmedical instruments.”37 Major General A. Zakharov, the head of the politicaldepartment of the LCSFA, told the newspaper Trud in February 1989 how“[s]ixty patients a day . . . was the norm for the local population treated by Sovietmedics.”38 Ultimately, according to Antonio Giustozzi, between 1981 and 1989“Soviet forces gave medical assistance to 400,000 Afghans and material aid toover 1,000,000.”39

Soviet troops also provided security to aid convoys and repaired the roads andbridges required to transport the aid. As the General Staff history says, “[d]uringthe years that the 40th Army was stationed in Afghanistan, the engineer forcescontinually worked to improve the roads and bridges that were vulnerable todevastation by the enemy and nature.”40 Repair of road infrastructure servedmilitary as much, if not more, than humanitarian purposes, for it enabled militarytransport to move more effectively, and, as General Gareev noted, “covering thestreets with asphalt prevented unnoticed mining.”41 Once again, therefore, thebenefits to the local population were essentially incidental by-products rather thandeliberate policy. Still, such activity did facilitate humanitarian aid, which wasdelivered on a large scale. Iurii Sal’nikov, a Soviet political advisor in Kandahar inthe mid-1980s, wrote how “[a] column arrives in the city with material aid fromthe Soviet Union for the inhabitants of Kandahar [, who] for a long time have beenawaiting salt, butter, galoshes, matches, and other necessary small items.”42 Manyother such columns unloaded in the major cities of Afghanistan throughout the1980s. Afghan food production plummeted as a result of the war. The SovietUnion responded by sending tens of thousands of tons of wheat to Afghanistaneach year, rising from 74,000 tons in 1981 to 200,000 in 1983, and eventuallyreaching 250,000 tons.43 For security reasons, all this aid had to be protected bySoviet forces.

37. The Russian General Staff, The Soviet-Afghan War: How a Superpower Fought and Lost(Lawrence, KS: UP of Kansas, 2002), 296.

38. “Vozvrashchenie,” Trud, 7 February 1989, 3.


40. The Russian General Staff, Soviet-Afghan War, 248.

41. Gareev, Afganskaia strada, 333.

42. Iurii Sal’nikov, Kandagar: zapiski sovetnika posol’stva (Volgograd: Volgogradskii Komitet poPechati, 1995), 115.


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Most of what has been described consisted of short-term humanitarian aid,designed to provide temporary relief. To a lesser degree, the Soviet Army alsoattempted to contribute to more permanent reconstruction and long-term eco-nomic development. Valerii Ivanov, a leading Soviet economic advisor in Afghani-stan in the 1980s, commented in an interview that the primary economiccontribution of the army was protecting key sites, such as power stations, facto-ries, and major irrigation facilities.44 For the most part, these were located innorthern Afghanistan, in the area of the gasfields around Sheberghan and the citiesof Mazar-i-Sharif and Pul-i-Khumri. Other key sites were in the city and environsof Kabul, the Jalalabad irrigation complex, and the city of Kandahar. The SovietArmy’s ability to support economic activity was, however, limited. The armyguarded and occupied the main cities and the major highway linking them, butbeyond this zone could do no more than conduct occasional raids. The army couldnot, therefore, protect industry and commerce in most of the country, especiallythe countryside, which was the source of the bulk of Afghanistan’s nationalincome. Still, its presence did play a vital role in enabling economic activity tocontinue at those sites it did guard, most notably the gasfields. Production at thesecame to an end immediately after the Soviet Army withdrew in 1989. Protectionof key points did not always involve combat. According to Anton Minkov, “Sovietofficers, especially those guarding strategic sites, would occasionally try to limithostilities with insurgent groups and to establish friendly relations with thesurrounding villages by entering into local deals and truces with villages and tribalauthorities, warlords and mujahidin commanders without formal authorisation[:]Over the years, this practice became widespread.”45

Soviet troops also sometimes carried out construction work, such as buildingand repairing homes and schools. References to the products of this work occa-sionally appear in contemporary reports. Soviet reporter Artyom Borovikrecorded how “[he] came upon a hotel that has been restored from ruins by Sovietsoldiers at a cost of eighty thousand rubles . . . , has all the comforts of modern life[and] is intended to house the refugees who are streaming in from Pakistan.”46

TASS claimed in July 1988 that, “[d]uring the years of their deployment inAfghanistan, the troops have built and restored more than 80 schools, 25

44. Interview with Valerii Ivanov by the author, 8 December 2008.

45. Anton Minkov, Soviet Counterinsurgency and Development Efforts in Afghanistan: Impli-cations for US Strategy in Iraq (Technical Memorandum TM 2009-017; Ottawa: DRDCCentre for Operational Research and Analysis, 2009), 13.

46. Artyom Borovik, The Hidden War: A Russian Journalist’s Account of the Soviet War inAfghanistan (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), 48.


hospitals, 26 kindergartens, 35 mosques and 325 residential houses. Hundreds ofkilometers of ditches and canals have been dug and bore-holes drilled to supplyfresh water for the population.”47 A few months later, in February 1989, GeneralZakharov issued similar, though slightly higher, figures: Soviet troops had, he said,built and repaired about 100 lycées, schools, and colleges, more than 25 hospitals,around 40 mosques, and many homes, and had dug or restored tens of kilometersof canals and irrigation ditches.48

To place this effort in context, it is worth noting that the Soviets are estimatedto have spent approximately 45 billion rubles on military operations in Afghani-stan from 1979 to 1989.49 In the same period, they spent a little over one billionrubles on economic and technical assistance,50 and perhaps two billion rubles inthe form of various subsidies and “free aid.”51 The military thus absorbed about94% of Soviet spending in Afghanistan, while non-military aid accounted for onlysix percent. Furthermore, the volume of military resources devoted to hearts andminds was small (one agitprop unit for every approximately 2,500-man regiment).Clearly, winning the support of the people took second place in Soviet thinking tofighting insurgents.

Even so, it should be pointed out that the scale of the Soviet effort was not thatmuch different from that of the United States in Afghanistan since 2001. Accord-ing to the Congressional Research Service, between 2001 and 2009 the war inAfghanistan cost the United States $187.9 billion, of which $175 billion went tothe Department of Defense and only $12.9 billion to diplomacy and aid, giving aratio of military to non-military spending of 94:6, the same proportion as theSoviets reached.52 The number of American troops specifically assigned to hearts-and-minds projects was also similar, with approximately 800 assigned to Provin-cial Reconstruction Teams out of a total complement of up to 60,000 troops. Thedifference between Soviets and Americans lies not so much in the volume ofresources assigned to hearts and minds as to the manner in which they were

47. TASS, 15 July 1988, in FBIS, International Affairs, FBIS-SOV-88-137, 18 July 1988, 35.

48. “Vozvrashchenie,” Trud, 7 February 1989, 3.

49. Saadet Deger & Somnath Sen, Military Expenditure: The Political Economy of InternationalSecurity (Stockholm: SIPRI, 1990), 126.

50. Data provided by Valerii Ivanov.

51. Designated “free aid” to distinguish it from other forms of aid, such as economic andtechnical assistance, which were paid for by loans, which in theory Afghanistan had to repay,although in practice the Soviet Union regularly rescheduled debt repayments.

52. Amy Belasco, The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operationssince 2001 (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2009), 13.


integrated into overall operations. The need to minimize violence and support thelocal population is taught to all Western troops in present-day Afghanistan. Thiswas not the case with the Soviets. It appears that for them combat was one thing,and hearts and minds another. The latter was merely something added on as anafterthought, not part of a coherent counter insurgency doctrine or part of ageneral culture which permeated all activity. This was an important weakness.

In the final two years of the Soviet presence in Afghanistan, 1987 and 1988, thetempo of hearts-and-minds operations increased significantly. For the first time,the Soviets appeared to be managing, even if imperfectly, to combine military andcivilian instruments in pursuit of a strategy which bore at least some relation tothe “whole-of-government” approach favored by counterinsurgency theorists. Bythe mid-1980s many senior Soviet officials, both military and civilian, were awarethat the Soviet Union could not achieve success in Afghanistan by purely militarymeans and were looking for an alternative strategy. The new Soviet leader MikhailGorbachev, who was elected General Secretary of the Communist Party of theSoviet Union in March 1985, became determined to withdraw the USSR’s forcesfrom the country. Not wishing to see the Afghan government collapse as a resultof a withdrawal, Gorbachev sought a political solution to the country’s problems,urging the Afghan leadership to strengthen the state through political reform. Thisimplied also an increased emphasis on winning popular support.

As a first step, in May 1986 the Soviets engineered the replacement of BabrakKarmal (1929–96) as Secretary General of the ruling People’s Democratic Party ofAfghanistan (PDPA) by Mohammad Najibullah (1947–96), who was generallyregarded as a much stronger but also more flexible leader. As Gilles Dorronsorowrites, “[t]he appointment of Najibullah gave a new impetus to reform andimplied a renunciation of the military solution. From now on the accent would beplaced on an indirect approach.”53

As a second step, Gorbachev informed Najibullah in December 1986 that theSoviet Union would withdraw its troops from Afghanistan within two years (infact it took two years and two months).54 Within a month Najibullah announcedthe start of a National Reconciliation Program. With this Najibullah abandonedmany of the dogmatic Marxist positions previously adopted by the PDPA, “liftedrestrictions on commerce,” introduced a “new attitude of respect for religion,”

53. Gilles Dorronsoro, Revolution Unending: Afghanistan 1979 to the Present (London: Hurst,2000), 195.

54. Henry S. Bradsher, Afghan Communism and Soviet Intervention (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999),279.


and sought to “establish contacts with opposition groups.”55 At the same time, thescale of Soviet economic and humanitarian assistance greatly increased, risingfrom about 450 million rubles in 1986 to about 1.25 billion rubles in 1987(meaning that the ratio of military to non-military expenditure shifted dramati-cally in 1987 from the previous average of 94:6 to about 80:20).56

According to one analyst, “the main initial impetus behind this policy shift inAfghanistan came primarily not from Moscow, but from the members of theOperational Group of the Ministry of Defense,” led by General Varennikov.57

From early 1987 onwards, changes in military policy accompanied the shift inpolitical policy, as at least some Soviet commanders sought to minimize militaryoperations and to find ways of using military power to win the support of Afghanpeople rather than attack them. As part of this change in direction, Varennikovintroduced a number of initiatives to better distribute aid to the Afghans, forinstance by using the hundreds of roadblocks manned by Soviet troops through-out the country as aid distribution points.58 And as we have seen, the tempo ofagitprop operations also rose during this period.

Some Soviet commanders began to pay compensation to Afghans whose prop-erty had been damaged by Soviet troops. General Liakhovskii, for instance,recounted a story in which he paid compensation to a group of villagers whosegoats had been seized. “I looked at these poor people and sincerely pitied them,”he wrote. “In principle we were here to defend them, but in practice we hurtthem,” an acknowledgement which would have served the Soviets better had itcome a few years earlier and had the feeling been more widespread.59 IuriiSal’nikov also described his efforts to give compensation to villagers whose homeshad been destroyed in an Afghan artillery bombardment. The villagers did notseem very interested in compensation, he noted; rather, they wanted to findsomeone to blame. Sal’nikov’s Afghan colleagues suggested appeasing this angerby taking a random prisoner from Kandahar prison, putting him in army uniform,presenting him to the villagers as the officer responsible for ordering the artillery

55. Dorronsoro, Revolution Unending, 196.

56. “Note by USSR Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov to Mikhail Gorbachev, Attaching StatePlanning Committee (Gosplan) Memorandum on Soviet Expenditures in Afghanistan,January 1988,” Cold War International History Project Bulletin 14–15, 2003–4, 255–6.

57. Alex Marshall, “Managing Withdrawal: Afghanistan as the Forgotten Example in Attempt-ing Conflict Resolution and State Reconstruction,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 1, 2007,68–89: 73.

58. Feifer, Great Gamble, 190.

59. Liakhovskii, Tragediia, 268.


strike, and then shooting him in front of them. Sal’nikov vetoed this “barbaricidea.”60

Some major military operations took on a new form. Instead of rapid sweepsto clear areas of mujahideen, who simply came back into the area as soon as thesweep was over, Soviet troops in at least some instances took a slower approach,designed to reduce both Soviet and Afghan casualties and to allow aid to bedistributed in the “liberated” areas. The most notable effort took place in Kan-dahar province in 1987. Operations here dragged on for several months, fromApril to October, in order “to avoid excessive casualties among our troops, thesoldiers of the Afghan army, and, of course, the population.”61 General Varenni-kov’s description of this operation is worthwhile to render at length, as it indicateshow the Soviets had come to develop a new form of counterinsurgency tactics fardifferent from the tactics of “migratory genocide” normally imputed to them:

Through military or KGB scouts we established contacts with leaders ofrebel bands and often reached agreement to decide all issues without battle.We sent material aid there [such as] flour, rice, fats, canned goods, sugar,kerosene, soap, etc. In many regions, medical groups arrived, and looked atnearly all the inhabitants of the village on the spot and provided them withmedicines [such as] antibiotics for bowel diseases, analgesics, and, of course,large quantities of aspirin. These medical-humanitarian detachments hadcolossal success. In a number of regions we built bridges, roads and evenwells; dug artesian bore-holes, and set up automatic diesel engines, whichpumped water and simultaneously powered generators giving electricpower.62

Soviet troops under Colonel Anatolii Kozin also attempted to repair the high-voltage line bringing electric power to Kandahar city from the Kajaki dam. This,it was hoped, would enable production to resume at the Kandahar woolen andcotton factories, which Varennikov suggested “would have been an enormouscontribution to the development of Afghanistan’s economy, and, consequently, toimproving the life of the people.”63 Ultimately, though, the effort to restore thepower line failed, due to repeated mujahideen sabotage.

60. Sal’nikov, Kandagar, 134–6.

61. Varennikov, Nepovtorimoe, 333.

62. Ibid., 331.

63. Ibid., 332.


Despite such failures, the new Soviet approach appears to have reaped divi-dends. As Varennikov noted, “By autumn 1987 in Kandahar and the greatmajority of districts of the province the situation had changed for the better in afundamental way.”64 Indeed, the months following the introduction of theNational Reconciliation Program and the change in Soviet tactics witnessed asharp increase in the number of mujahideen who surrendered to the government,although it is clear neither which was the decisive factor in bringing this about norhow long-lasting the impact was.65

Despite the progress made in 1987, the situation in the country remainedcritical, especially as the LCSFA prepared to withdraw. Most of the countrysideremained in rebel hands. Unable to take the major cities by storm, the mujahideeninstead endeavored to strangle them to death, cutting the main roads to preventthe arrival of food, fuel, and other necessities of life. The situation becameparticularly bad in Kabul in the winter of 1988–89. The Soviet armed forcesplayed a vital role in alleviating the conditions. In the final months of theirpresence in Afghanistan, massive humanitarian relief became one of their majortasks. As TASS reported in January 1989:

People in many Afghan cities are having a hard time. . . . Formerly crowdedstreets in Kabul’s downtown shopping area now are empty. . . . Roadslinking Kabul with the country’s south and east have been cut off by rebels,while the only operating road north through the Salang pass is posing athreat to traffic due to snow drifts. Each day, scores of Aeroflot and military-transport planes bring here foodstuffs and fuel which are later distributedfree of charge among the most needy citizens. On January 19, Soviet andAfghan soldiers distributed more than 40 tons of flour and rice and nearly30,000 litres of kerosene among hundreds of families.66

Artyom Borovik met one of the soldiers giving out the airlifted flour in Kabul.“This is some kind of international duty,” the soldier told Borovik, “[y]ou shootthem with one hand and put food in their mouths with the other.”67

Even more supplies came in by road on convoys managed and escorted by theSoviet Army. Near the end of 1988, General Liakhovskii found hundreds of

64. Ibid., 334.


66. TASS, 20 January 1989, in FBIS, FBIS-SOV-89-013, 23 January 1989, 36.

67. Borovik, Hidden War, 240.


wagons of goods donated by Soviet republics and oblasts stuck at the railhead atTermez on the Soviet-Afghan border. Some of them had been there for as much aseighteen months, unable to be moved due to the shortage of transport in Afghani-stan. Liakhovskii organized the shipment of these and other goods, including vitalsupplies for Kabul, over the winter of 1988–89. In November-December 1988alone, 27,500 tons of goods were transported from the Afghan border town ofHairatan to Kabul, half by vehicles of the Soviet Army.68 The convoys and airliftshad the desired effect. While Kabul remained under siege, famine was avoided,and by May 1989, following the complete withdrawal of Soviet forces fromAfghanistan, “the crisis was over.”69

It is difficult to determine to what extent Soviet hearts-and-minds operationsactually won any hearts and minds. Antonio Giustozzi speculates that “[e]ven ifnot many villages joined the government side as a consequence of the agitpropeffort, it may well be that the traditional hostility of the countryside towardsKabul was reduced to some extent.”70 This, though, is only speculation, and wehave no firm data as to the effectiveness of the effort. As Giustozzi notes,

. . . much depended on the quality of the cadres involved in the propagandaeffort. In Samangan province, the success of the Soviet agitprop campaignwas in large measure due to the abilities of a Tajik officer of the Red Army,who was well received by the population because he knew the local customsand had ‘a respectful attitude’ towards the Afghans.71

It stands to reason, however, that most soldiers or units were rather less able topropitiate the local population.

The interpreter who described the agitprop raid quoted above disparaged theraid’s success. The Soviet soldiers did not distribute their goods directly to thevillagers they met, but gave them instead to a village elder to distribute:

As he swears publicly that all will be done honestly and properly his sonsbegin to carry the gifts to their house. ‘Do you think he’ll share things outfairly?’ the CO [commanding officer] worries. ‘I doubt it. The locals have

68. Liakhovskii, Tragediia, 445. The goods were delivered following a 1987 Soviet-Afghanagreement on “direct ties” between Afghan provinces and Soviet republics and oblasts. Theywere provided free of charge rather than on credit.

69. Barnett Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in theInternational System (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1995), 171.


71. Ibid.


already warned us he’s a grafter. Tomorrow it’ll all be for sale in theshops.’72

This was a perpetual problem with aid distributed through the Afghan authori-ties: It tended to disappear and not go to those for whom it was intended. This wasprobably one reason why General Varennikov sought to use Soviet roadblocks togive out aid. This was a way of bypassing corrupt officials and giving aid directlyto those who needed it. Iurii Sal’nikov complained that Soviet “fertilizers andseeds do not reach the peasants for whom they have been designated [for l]ocalbureaucrats divert the material aid which has come from the Soviet Union to theblack market and sell it to the peasants at three times the price.”73 Similarly, inJanuary 1989, a TASS report describing the airlift of aid to Kabul complained that“substantial consignments of food that are delivered are concealed instead ofsold.”74

Corruption was not the only problem the Soviets faced with the Afghangovernment and the PDPA. As Bhabani Sen Gupta comments, “Of all the Marxistrevolutions in the Third World, the Afghan revolution has come most conspicu-ously from above . . . the PDPA was nowhere near the party of Lenin in leadershipquality, organization, ideology, and disciplined cadres.”75 The PDPA was alsodeeply divided between its Khalq and Parcham factions, whose members spentmuch of their time fighting one another rather than common enemies. As Senwrites, “[n]ot only did the Khalq and Parcham factions fall out with one anotherwithin weeks of the revolution, within Khalq also, factional infighting broke outin no time, and these disputes were settled by bullets rather than by votes.”76

Consequently, the government was extremely weak, and lacked the capacity toexploit any success achieved by the Soviet Army. As Varennikov complained,“[Communist] Party and state organs looked on passively rather than exploit theresults of successful military operations [because of which] military operationscould have only temporary results in stabilizing the situation in the country.”77

72. Alexievich, Zinky Boys, 144[o].

73. Sal’nikov, Kandagar, p. 115.

74. TASS International Service, 21 January 1989, FBIS, FBIS-SOV-89-013, 23 January 1989, 36.

75. Bhabani Sen Gupta, Afghanistan: Politics, Economics, Society (Boulder, CO: Lynner Rienner,1986), 158.

76. Ibid, 68.

77. See Varennikov, Nepovtorimoe, 195. See also pages 171, 173, and 176 for further commentsin this regard.


John Nagl, a prominent modern counterinsurgency theorist, underscores Varen-nikov’s viewpoint when he notes how “the establishment of a legitimate, func-tioning government is the surest means to fostering a lasting peace.”78 The Sovietexperience in Afghanistan supports this conclusion. It did the Soviets little good totry to win Afghan hearts and minds when the Afghan government itself was ofteninadvertently doing its very best to alienate them.

Any effort in changing Afghan perception about the Soviets was beset by otherproblems as well. For example, Afghans were not always aware that the aid theyreceived came from the Soviet Union. Soviet packaging was poor, and Afghanmerchants who resold pilfered aid repackaged it in materials brought from refugeecamps in Pakistan. General Liakhovskii complained that his soldiers wereoffended to find Soviet aid being sold in bazaars in bags saying “A gift from theAmerican people” or “A gift from the government of Canada.”79 Soviet aid wasprobably less successful in winning the gratitude of ordinary Afghans than itought to have been.

The history of Soviet hearts-and-minds operations is a history of too little, toolate. Soviet troops were notoriously ill-disciplined, and most commanders madelittle effort to punish those who mistreated locals. As a result, “killing civiliansand taking their property soon seemed almost normal.”80 We cannot tell howcommon behavior such as that of the house-building Uzbek Sergeant Pugmanovwas, but, given the indiscipline of Soviet troops, we can assume that it was greatlyoutweighed by behavior of a more abusive type. As Feifer comments,

In the few parts of the country the Soviets controlled, they set up schoolsand day-care centers. Soviet officials also provided aid to farmers, then paidgenerously for their produce. But civilian aid of that kind was small com-pensation for the growing number of atrocities committed elsewhere in thecountryside.”81

By the time Soviet commanders began to take hearts and minds seriously, toomany had already been lost for it ever to be likely that they would be won backin large numbers.

78. Interview with LTC John A. Nagl, http://www.opensourcesinfo.org/resource/Interview_20with_20LTC_20John_20A_20Nagl.pdf?fileId=649884.

79. Liakhovskii, Liakhovskii, 446–7.

80. Feifer, Great Gamble, 166.

81. Ibid., 168.


Moreover, while some senior officers such as Generals Varennikov, Gareev, andLiakhovskii came to understand their importance, it is not clear how widespreadthis understanding was. The memoirs of the last commander of the LCSFA,General Gromov, for instance, make no mention of hearts-and-minds operations,and show that he regarded as his primary purpose to avoid operations of all sortsas much as possible in order to forestall casualties. Hearts-and-minds operationsinvolve risk, as the soldiers delivering aid expose themselves to danger. By themid-1980s, very many Soviet officers had become risk-averse.

Furthermore, the Soviet officers who did place a strong importance on thisaspect of the campaign were not able to fully coordinate their actions with otherSoviet agencies. As General Gareev complained, “[t]he Soviet political and mili-tary leadership from the very start, in truth right up to the very end, had nodefinite political, strategic plan and single conception of how to use military forcesin Afghanistan.”82 “There was,” Gareev continued, “no responsible person towhom all the institutions carrying out various tasks were subordinate.”83 Differ-ent institutions and parts of institutions pursued different and often contradictorypolicies. Despite occasional examples of local coordination, as in Kandahar in1987, hearts-and-minds operations were thus never properly coordinated into ageneral counterinsurgency strategy across the whole of Afghanistan.

In any case, assuming that General Zakharov’s figures are accurate, the volumeof reconstruction carried out by Soviet forces was grossly inadequate, givenAfghanistan’s needs. Zakharov claimed that Soviet troops built or repaired about100 schools and colleges during the 1980s. In the same time period, the muja-hideen were reported to have destroyed over 2,000.84 Any benefits brought bySoviet aid were far outweighed by the destruction brought by the war.

Finally, it is worth noting that the Afghan experience did not result in theproduction of any formal counterinsurgency doctrine incorporating the lessonslearned in the 1980s. Rather like their counterparts in the US Army after Vietnam,Russian officers seem to have decided that the main lesson to draw from coun-terinsurgency experience was not to engage in counterinsurgencies. Instead, theychose to re-focus on studying conventional inter-state warfare. As General Gareevcomplains, “[d]espite the ten-year experience in Afghanistan and the experience ofother countries in local armed conflicts our military art has remained until recently


83. Ibid, 62.

84. L. B. Aristova, “Sotsial’naia infrastruktura Afganistana,” in Iu.V. Gankovskii, ed., Afgani-stan. Istoriia, ekonomika, kul’tura: sbornik statei (Moscow: Nauka, 1989), 99–106: 101.


completely oriented only to global, large-scale war [, considering] local wars assomething temporary, occasional, uncharacteristic of contemporary armed con-flict and unworthy of ‘serious’ study.”85 The initial failure of the Russian Army inChechnya in the mid-1990s may well have been the price Russians paid for thisneglect.

Nonetheless, the prevailing view among Western historians that the Soviets didnot attempt any kind of hearts-and-minds strategy in Afghanistan is clearlywrong. Even if Soviet hearts-and-minds operations did not win the Soviet Unionmany friends, they did take place, and did provide some benefits to those whoreceived them. In particular, the airlift and aid convoys to Kabul in the winter of1988–89 provided substantial relief to the inhabitants of Afghanistan’s capitalcity, without which, commentators agree, Najibullah’s regime could not havesurvived.86 As Marshall writes, in addition to fighting a military campaign, “theSoviet Union also poured humanitarian aid into the country . . . in a massiveattempt to relieve the suffering of the local population [. . . ,] the Soviet interven-tion resembled more a poorly conducted stabilization effort than a conventionalcampaign of invasion and annexation.”87


86. For instance, Martin Ewans, Conflict in Afghanistan: Studies in Asymmetric Warfare(London: Routledge, 2005), 150.

87. Marshall, “Managing Withdrawal,” 70.


Documents

Soviet Hearts-and-Minds Operations in Afghanistan