at this time, there were still Politburo members in place who had
been in office at the time of the invasion – notably Gromyko,
First Secretary of the Moscow City Party Committee Viktor
Grishin, Ukrainian Party First Secretary Vladimir Shcherbitskii,
and the First Secretary of the Kazakhstan Party organisation
Dinmukhamed Kunaev.
13 November 1986
Dobrynin’s view that the 17 October 1985 meeting was the de-
cisive one is debatable. There can be much less debate about the
significance of a Politburo meeting held on 13 November 1986. ‘If
there was a key decision’, Halliday has written, ‘then this was it’
(Halliday, 1999: 684), a view shared by Henry S. Bradsher
(Bradsher, 1999: 277). The details of the meeting became known
in late 1992 when Michael Dobbs of The Washington Post
obtained a declassified transcript of the meeting (Dobbs, 1992),
and the transcript itself appeared in the journal Voprosy istoriiin
- Interestingly, the official transcript carried the title ‘On Zahir
Shah’, even though the former Afghan King received no mention
in the actual Politburo discussion. The transcript in its mimeo-
graphed form was marked ‘Top Secret’ (Sov. sekretno), and there
can be little doubt that the participants believed that what they said
would indeed remain hidden from the wider world. Thus, while the
views that they advanced certainly reflected underlying political
calculations and rhetorical strategies, they are of remarkable value
to the historian. During the meeting, Gorbachev expressed his
views with uncompromising firmness: ‘In Afghanistan we have
already been fighting for six years. If the approach is not changed,
the fighting will go on for another 20–30 years’ (Grossman, 1993:
- After referring to the October 1985 meeting, Gorbachev pro-
posed that over a two-year period (v techenie dvukh let) the USSR
should withdraw its forces from Afghanistan, with 50 per cent to
be withdrawn in 1987 and the remaining 50 per cent in the fol-
lowing year (Grossman, 1993: 26). The members of the Politburo
agreed.
The Road to Soviet Withdrawal 131