the commitment. (In downtown Moscow in early 1989, I was pre-
sented with a mimeographed collection of poems by an afganets
which on the cover bore a scathing cartoon of a doddering
Brezhnev, with a bottle of vodka in his belt, directing a host of
young conscripts to a flaming hell through an archway labelled
‘Afganistan’.) This is not to suggest that the afgantsybecame an
organised political lobby with a high degree of influence, but given
the relaxations associated with the policy of glasnost’, they were
well positioned to articulate positions which subtly altered the cli-
mate of opinion towards decision making by the top party elite.
Here, it is worth noting that events such as the war in
Afghanistan can have both immediate and metaphorical impacts.
Immediate impacts are discernible in war-related mortality,
bereavement, injury, and trauma. But metaphorical impacts can be
just as potent in social and political terms. The sinking of the
Titanic, in April 1912, became metaphorically important, because it
symbolised the perils of a hubris which decreed that a maritime
vessel was unsinkable. Neville Chamberlain’s unfortunate speech
referring to ‘peace in our time’ following the September 1938
Munich Agreement became the defining image of appeasement,
symbolising the triumph of self-delusion over a realistic assess-
ment of what had happened. And for the intellectual supporters of
Gorbachev, ‘Afghanistan’ became a metaphor capturing the evils of
‘stagnation’: it was no surprise that figures such as Academician
Andrei Sakharov brought up the matter of Afghanistan very fre-
quently (Sakharov, 1988).
Faith in the party leadership
A loss of faith in the party leadership was actually a very serious
development in the Soviet system. Competitive party systems are
typically defended as giving substance to democratic accountabil-
ity, providing an alternative set of rulers to whom the public can
switch their loyalties if the current rulers prove inadequate. One-
party systems inevitably depend upon overt coercion or the fear of
it, since this is necessary to quash attempts to establish alterna-
160 The Afghanistan Wars