THE USSR AND CHANGE IN THE KABUL REGIME
At the beginning of the 1980s, the Soviet Union appeared to be a
permanent fixture on the global political scene. The chill which
followed the invasion of Afghanistan provided an opportunity for
the KGB to move against the USSR’s dissident movement at a
time when the marginal cost of doing so would be negligible, and
it did so very effectively (see Alexeyeva, 1985; Karklins, 1987).
Individual protests still occurred, as on 18 May 1983 when a
broadcaster on Radio Moscow’s English service, Vladimir
Danchev, referred to tribes in eastern provinces ‘joining the strug-
gle against the Soviet invaders’ (‘L’annonceur moscovite’, Les
Nouvelles d’Afghanistan, no. 14, June–August 1983: 9). The most
famous Soviet dissident, Academician Andrei Sakharov, also con-
demned the invasion, and was exiled with his wife Elena Bonner
to the ‘closed’ city of Gorkii. However, such acts were isolated
displays of moral courage, and appeared not to shake a monolith-
ically powerful regime.
Problems of stagnation in the USSR
None the less, this impression of stability was misleading. In a
number of respects, the Soviet system was facing increased strain
(Colton, 1986: 6–67; Miller, 1993: 21–37). First, the Soviet econ-
omy was teetering on the edge of a major slowdown. It was one of
the most centralised in human history, and heavily bureaucratised.
The basic planning mechanism was the State Planning Commission
(Gosplan), originally established in 1921. Five-Year Plans set out
targets for important economic aggregates such as investment,
manufacturing production, agricultural output, and consumption.
The planning organs, however, were more and more obviously
unequal to the task of coordinating vast amounts of information, a
task which markets accomplish in a decentralised fashion. While
limited specific tasks could normally be performed by the swift
mobilisation of resources that a command economy permitted, this
was at the expense of wider levels of consumption and consumer
The Karmal Period, 1979–1986 103