which helped seize the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg during the
1917 October Revolution, but for practical purposes their origins
were much more recent. The 1921 uprising of sailors of the
Kronstadt garrison killed off the Party’s enthusiasm for revolution-
ary sentiment within the military, and the charge of ‘Bonapartism’ –
seeking to rise to political heights through military achievements –
was a potent means of discrediting opponents. The Great Purges of
the 1930s wiped out vital components of the officer corps, notably
the distinguished revolutionary soldier Marshal Tukhachevskii, and
set the scene for the emergence of those commanders who were to
serve with such prowess from the German invasion of the USSR in
June 1941 to the Soviet occupation of Berlin in April 1945, most
famously Marshal Georgii Zhukov. However, as Zhukov was him-
self to discover in October 1957, when he was unceremoniously
retired as Defence Minister to make way for Khrushchev’s associ-
ate Marshal Rodion Malinovskii (see Colton, 1979: 175–95), it did
not pay for a soldier to become too powerful. At the time of the
invasion of Afghanistan, the Defence Minister came from a party
background; and the Chief of the General Staff was Marshal
Nikolai Ogarkov, who had held the position since January 1977,
and according to a careful observer was ‘an outstanding military
intellectual and theorist’ (Herspring, 1990: 126). Notably, however,
he did nothave a career path which had led him through the ‘line
branches’ of the Soviet military, and as a result, there was little risk
that he could draw on networks of patronage of a kind that could
permit him to challenge the political leadership in a crisis. As far as
Afghanistan was concerned, Ogarkov proved no obstacle to the
execution of the invasion decision, even though there is some evi-
dence that he was personally opposed to it (Odom, 1998: 460–1).
Within the USSR, the instruments of state propaganda were
extensively used to promote the image and reputation of the armed
forces. To some, this was a significant dimension of Soviet ‘mili-
tarism’ (Pipes, 1980), but it can be argued that the objective of
such propaganda was actually somewhat more subtle than such ter-
minology would suggest. Undoubtedly, the projection of an image
of the armed forces as fulfilling a ‘sacred duty’ (sviashennyi dolg)
38 The Afghanistan Wars