palatable – his own fate showed this rather clearly – and in reality
there were significant groups which resisted the relabelling of the
Afghanistan experience even though by the time Tsagolov’s views
appeared in print, the Soviet withdrawal was irreversibly in train.
The pace of elite turnover meant that the views of those who were
directly inculpated at the highest level in the original invasion
decision were substantially irrelevant by the late 1980s; but the
institutions which were involved both in the prosecution of the war
and in the attempt to nurture the Afghan communists into some
semblance of a viable political force stood to lose more from the
exposure of their failings.
The role of Gorbachev
Here, it was of crucial significance that there was a new leader in
place in the USSR. While formally elected by the Central
Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the
General Secretary was in practice selected by the members of the
Politburo from within their number. To some degree this limited
the capacity of the Politburo rapidly to divest themselves of a
General Secretary who proved unorthodox, since to do so would
raise questions about the wisdom of having selected him in the
first place. This gave Gorbachev scope for innovation, although
only after a certain amount of consensus-building had been
attempted. In fact, Gorbachev raised the Afghanistan issue even
before the end of the year in which he acceded to office. On 17
October 1985, there was a Politburo discussion of Afghanistan, at
a meeting which Dobrynin, who attended it, has described as ‘the
decisive one in determining our withdrawal’. He quotes
Gorbachev as saying, ‘It’s time to leave’, and adds that there was
‘no objection’, although the Politburo ‘did not yet fix any con-
crete dates’ (Dobrynin, 1995: 442). Chernyaev, who also attended
the meeting, puts Gorbachev at centre stage, quoting him as say-
ing that ‘With or without Karmal’s consent, we’ll take a firm line
on the matter of our rapid withdrawal from Afghanistan’
(Chernyaev, 2000: 42). This approach took a certain courage, for
130 The Afghanistan Wars