A new leader with unorthodox views, economic weakness, an
intellectually impoverished ideology, rifts in ‘world communism’,
and renewed competition with a superpower rival were all con-
siderations of notable significance, helping to fuel the crisis of
faith in the party leadership discussed earlier. But some of these
factors were themselves heightened in significance as a result of
the war in Afghanistan. Anthony Arnold has compared
Afghanistan to a ‘fateful pebble’, tripping up a tired and stum-
bling walker (Arnold, 1993). In a useful article, Rafael Reuveny
and Aseem Prakash have sought to identify different effects
which the Afghanistan war had on Soviet politics. First, they note
perceptioneffects. The war, they argue, ‘changed the Soviet lead-
ership’s perception of the efficacy of holding their diverse coun-
try together by using military force’. In the light of this
development, within the USSR itself, ‘non-Russian movements
were emboldened to openly preach secession’. Second were mili-
taryeffects. ‘Since the military’, they argue, ‘was an important
pillar of the anti-perestroikacamp, the reverses in Afghanistan
weakened anti-reformists, hastened perestroika, and facilitated
the collapse of the system.’ The war ‘created conditions for the
demilitarizing of Soviet society’. Third were legitimacyeffects:
the war ‘accentuated the cleavages between the non-Russian
republics and the Soviet state’. Fourth were glasnost’ effects: the
war ‘added new vigour to the forces unleashed by glasnost’
(Reuveney and Prakash, 1999: 698–705). All these are plausible
points, although debate over their weight compared to other fac-
tors will inevitably persist.
One final issue deserves mention, and that is the role of
Afghanistan in the failure of the coup attempt in Moscow in
August 1991. If there was a coup de grâceagainst both the Soviet
sociopolitical order and the Soviet Union as a territorial unit, then
the failure of the conservatives in the ‘State Committee for the
Extraordinary Situation’ to seize and retain Soviet power was it.
One of the key reasons why the coup failed was that the Soviet
armed forces split, notwithstanding Defence Minister Iazov’s hav-
ing joined the ‘State Committee’ (see Sixsmith, 1991; Billington,
Consequences of the Soviet–Afghan War 165