direct competition with the Western powers, notably Europe, East
Asia, and – to the extent that the Middle East attracted Soviet
interests – Iran, which during the Second World War had been
divided into Soviet and British spheres of influence.
In 1953, however, two momentous events occurred. First, Stalin
died, leaving no designated successor. Within a few days of
Stalin’s death, Nikita S. Khrushchev secured the position of First
Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union, and set out to consolidate his position by adopting
new policy positions, a process which culminated in his denunci-
ation of Stalin’s ‘cult of personality’ at the twentieth Party
Congress in February 1956. Second, in Afghanistan, Muhammad
Daoud was appointed Prime Minister. Committed to a programme
of state building, he recognised the need for externally supplied
resources to fund his plans. And with the change of leadership in
Moscow, the Soviet Union loomed as a potential supplier.
Khrushchev was to develop a foreign policy approach which
displayed some sensitivity to the changing configurations of world
politics. In 1955, a conference at Bandung in Indonesia, attended
on Afghanistan’s behalf by the diplomat Said Qassem Reshtia,
marked the birth of what came to be known as the Non-Aligned
Movement. Alert to the opportunities which this offered,
Khrushchev advanced a new theory of international relations,
which, as well as positing the possibility of ‘peaceful coexistence’
between socialist and capitalist countries, located socialist and
developingcountries together in a ‘Zone of Peace’ (Kubálková and
Cruickshank, 1980: 161–3). This theoretical innovation opened the
door to direct engagement between the USSR and the developing
world. More concretely, in December 1955, he and the Chairman
of the Soviet Council of Ministers, Nikolai Bulganin, paid an offi-
cial visit to Kabul, the first ever by a Soviet leader (Novichkova,
1956). In the context of substantial US indifference to Afghanistan
- Washington having shown little interest in cultivating Daoud as
long as he prosecuted a border dispute with America’s ally
Pakistan (Poullada, 1981) – this set the scene for Soviet penetra-
tion of Afghanistan in two vital respects. The first was military.
20 The Afghanistan Wars