emigré journal Strana i mir, which concluded that 62 per cent of
respondents did not support the war, and 41 per cent of Communist
Party members in the sample did not either (US State Department,
1985). A June 1985 report from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
suggested that only one quarter of the Soviet adult urban popula-
tion approved of Soviet policy or expressed ‘confidence in the
eventual success of official policy’ (RFE/RL, 1985: 1). And the
advent of candour in the Soviet media from 1986, combined with
the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan by February
1989, permitted much sharper expressions of opinion, although
doubtless shaped in part by criticisms of the policy emanating from
the political elite, and by the benefit of hindsight. Thus in a March
1991 survey conducted by the All-Union Centre for the Study of
Social Opinion (Vsesoiuznyi tsentr izucheniia obshchestvennogo
mneniia, or VTsIOM), 89 per cent of respondents stated it was ‘not
necessary’ to have sent Soviet forces to Afghanistan in December
1979, while 71 per cent agreed with those who described the
despatch of Soviet forces to Afghanistan as a ‘state crime’
(VTsIOM, 1991: 25–6). These figures can do no more than give a
taste of what opinion was at the time, but they strongly suggest
that there was simply not the mood to support a prolonged war, a
mood of the kind which, for example, sustained Britain during the
darkest days of the struggle against Hitler. In this context, it is
notable that the Soviet media in the early years of the war, far
from using Afghanistan as a platform for the promotion of patriot-
ic fervour, said as little about it as they could (Broxup, 1988).
Managing the human and material costs of the war for the
USSR constituted Moscow’s second dilemma. Foreign Minister
Shevardnadze in a speech to the 27th Party Congress in July 1990
stated the costs of the war as 60 billion roubles, excluding ‘human
casualties and other suffering’(BBC Summary of World Broadcasts
SU/0808/C1/15, 5 July 1990). But even material costs of the war
defy ready calculation. The mysteries of the Soviet military
budget, together with the difficulty of converting into Western
currencies sums expressed in Soviet roubles, and the problem of
deciding what costs should be attributed to the war itself, make it
54 The Afghanistan Wars