March negotiations with Kosygin, Taraki had requested ‘a large
radio station, which would allow us to broadcast propaganda
throughout the world’ (Hershberg, 1996–97: 149). At a Politburo
session two days later, Leonid Zamiatin, Head of the International
Information Department of the Party Secretariat, had tabled pro-
posals ‘to redirect a booster transmitter with a strength of 1000
kilowatts which is located close to Dushanbe near the border with
Afghanistan’ (Hershberg, 1996–97: 151). One doubts whether
Taraki foresaw all the possible uses of such a transmitter.
The disastrous plunge into the Afghan quagmire was driven by a
number of different factors, which reinforced each other. First, the
decision-making process lacked the checks and balances necessary
to avert looming catastrophe. Experts were not properly consulted
(Bogomolov, 1988), and the Soviet professional military, even if
they were wary of involvement as many now maintain, were not
prepared to risk charges of Bonapartism by challenging the party
leadership (Bradsher, 1999: 83–4). The distaste that the leadership
felt for Amin after the murder of Taraki overwhelmed the wisdom
which Kosygin had reflected during the March negotiations, and
Kosygin was himself too ill by late 1979 to offer a steadying hand.
Second, the leadership carried a heavy burden of historical mem-
ory. Andropov was described as having a ‘Hungarian complex’
which disinclined him to accept the overthrow of a socialist
regime. Following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in
August 1968, the Brezhnev Doctrine had asserted the common
responsibility of the socialist states to counter threats to socialism
in any one state of the socialist community, a term which the
USSR had applied to Afghanistan in May 1979 (Arnold, 1983:
84–5; see also Jones, 1990). For figures such as Gromyko,
Ponomarev, and party ideologist Mikhail A. Suslov, such consider-
ations may have tipped the balance of calculations otherwise based
on interest. Third, the Soviet Union was much more concerned
with developments in the so-called ‘Third World’ than is often now
remembered. The Khrushchevian model of the world which co-
located socialist and developing countries had triggered extensive
theoretical debate (see Papp, 1985; Hough, 1986; Allison, 1988),
The Road to War 35