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

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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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SOVIET INVASION OF AFGHANISTAN A CASE OF MISSION CREEP, ACCORDING TO NEW BOOK AND ORIGINAL SOVIET DOCUMENTS