The Truth About Afghanistan

Not a study but a rapid-response file, assembled to be handed to a foreign journalist, a friendly parliamentarian or a Western Communist Party press officer who needed something to say.

The dated items run from 27 December 1979 to early February 1980, and it was in English and in circulation later that year. A turnaround of a few months tells you what it is.

It was published by the Novosti Press Agency rather than by Progress, and the distinction matters. Progress was the prestige house - Marx, Lenin, philosophy, textbooks. Novosti was the Soviet Union's other news agency, formally sponsored by public organisations rather than by the state, which was precisely its usefulness: TASS spoke as the government, while Novosti supplied material presentable as something other than an official Soviet statement.

The construction is visible in the credit lines. The eyewitness chapter is the part a reader is meant to find persuasive, because it is not Brezhnev talking: the witnesses are correspondents of the Communist Party papers of the United States, India, Greece, France, Czechoslovakia and Portugal. Every one was flown to Kabul in January 1980 by the government he then vindicated, and most filed specially for the agency publishing the book.

As a specimen of how a state answered a General Assembly vote it had lost by 104 to 18, it is unusually legible.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.