positively misleading to attempt to sum up the war’s costs in a
simple figure. But as to human costs, three points deserve to be
made. First, statistics published after the withdrawal of Soviet
forces point to significant mortality. According to one set of fig-
ures, between 25 December 1979 and 15 February 1989, 13,833
Soviet soldiers were killed or died of wounds or illness. Of these,
1979 were officers. Of the 49,985 wounded, 7132 were officers.
Some 6669 became invalids (Liakhovskii and Zabrodin, 1991:
213). These losses were not evenly spread through Soviet society:
as Odom observes, those families ‘with more income and better
social positions were better able to keep their sons from being sent
to Afghanistan’ (Odom, 1998: 247). To these figures should be
added the remarkable total of those who fell ill in Afghanistan:
404,414 (Odom, 1998: 249). Second, the dead tended to be very
young: 8655 of the Soviet war dead, or 62.6 per cent, were under
20 years old (Liakhovskii and Zabrodin, 1991: 215). They came to
be known as tsinkovye mal’chiki, or ‘Zinky Boys’, from the zinc
lining of the coffins in which their remains were returned to the
USSR. Svetlana Alexievich has provided a moving and poignant
account of the grief which these deaths caused to the families of
the dead, and a useful reminder of what a tragedy the war was to
be for large numbers of ordinary families north of Afghanistan’s
border (Alexievich, 1992). Third, the USSR was left with a burden
of embittered and disgruntled war veterans (afgantsy), whom one
author described as ‘disempowered plebeians of the Soviet social
order’ (Galeotti, 1995: 45). The social costs of dealing with the
problems of the veterans continues to emburden the states which
emerged following the disintegration of the Soviet Union in late
1991.
The third and fourth dilemmas I have already noted, and simply
reiterate for the sake of completeness: the narrow support base of
the Karmal regime posed a fundamental political challenge to the
Soviet leadership from the moment of the invasion, while the
propensity of resistance to intensify as a result of the regime’s
dependence upon Soviet backing limited the USSR’s options in
meeting the challenge. These problems, firmly in Kosygin’s mind
Soviet Strategy, Tactics, and Dilemmas 55