Daoud, while prepared to use Parchamfor his own purposes,
was first and foremost a nationalist. This lay at the heart of a spec-
tacular clash which he had with Soviet General Secretary Brezhnev
on 12 April 1977, during a state visit to the USSR. As recounted
by an eyewitness, Brezhnev demanded the removal from northern
Afghanistan of experts from NATO countries. An angry Daoud
described Brezhnev’s remark as a flagrant interference in the
internal affairs of Afghanistan, and continued ‘we will never allow
you to dictate to us how to run our country and whom to employ
in Afghanistan. How and where we employ the foreign experts will
remain the exclusive prerogative of the Afghan state. Afghanistan
shall remain poor, if necessary, but free in its acts and decisions’
(Ghaus, 1988: 179). How prominent a role might this clash have
played in the overthrow of Daoud barely a year later?
Unfortunately, this is impossible to determine with any certainty.
To say that by responding in this way Daoud signed his own death
warrant involves imputing to the Soviet leadership both a central
role in the initiation of the April 1978 coup, and a motivation to
play such a role derived from a loss of faith in Daoud resulting
from the clash a year earlier. As we shall shortly see, evidence of
either of these is scanty. However, it is possible to defend a more
cautious conclusion, namely that the growing disenchantment with
Daoud may have disinclined the Soviet leadership to take active
steps to block his overthrow by the Afghan communists once they
were so inclined.
The sclerotic Soviet elite
In responding to these events, however, the Soviet regime was
hampered by its own sclerosis. By the late 1970s, the ageing of the
Soviet elite was beginning to affect Soviet politics and policies in
subtle but increasingly damaging ways. The origins of this problem
were quite remote in time: during the 1930s, a large group of
activists, known as the vydvizhentsy(‘those moved forward’), rose
rapidly as a result of the elimination of large numbers of so-called
‘Old Bolsheviks’ during the Great Purge. A very large number of
The Road to War 23