carefully controlled by the party via the nomenklaturaor ‘list’ sys-
tem (Harasymiw, 1969). Competing parties did not exist, and dissi-
dent voices were subject to severe repression by organs of the
state, entailing on occasion imprisonment in labour camps, internal
exile, or even incarceration on spurious ‘psychiatric’ grounds.
Soviet relations with Afghanistan
The international relations of Russia following the Bolshevik revo-
lution of 1917 followed a somewhat tortuous path. The
Bolsheviks’ early hope that their revolution would be replicated in
the capitalist states of Western Europe went unrealised, although
Hungary was briefly ruled by the Communist Béla Kun, and
Germany witnessed short-lived outbreaks of localised revolution-
ary extremism. As Joseph Stalin consolidated his position within
the Soviet leadership following the death of V. I. Lenin in 1924, he
positioned himself to declare a commitment to ‘socialism in one
country’, which soon became official Soviet policy. This did not
mean, however, that the leadership of the new ‘Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics’ was without a foreign policy. On the contrary,
it retained an interest in what was occurring in its immediate
neighbours, and one of these, of course, was Afghanistan. This
was, in part, because Central Asia remained an area in which
Bolshevik power was contested, albeit on a diminishing scale as
the 1920s drew to a close, by the so-called ‘Basmachi movement’
(Maley, 1991a: 181). However, it was also because some saw
Afghanistan as a vital interest of the British, whose intervention
against Bolshevik rule in 1918–20 was bitterly resented. The ‘road
to Paris and London’, L. D. Trotsky had remarked, ‘might lead
through Kabul, Calcutta and Bombay’ (Deutscher, 1954: 457).
During Stalin’s lifetime, Soviet–Afghan relations remained low-
key. The Soviet leadership was increasingly alarmed during the
late 1930s by the threat posed by Nazi Germany, and almost whol-
ly preoccupied from June 1941 with the prosecution of the war
against the Nazi invaders – a war in which Afghanistan remained
neutral. Thereafter, Moscow’s interests focused on theatres of more
The Road to War 19