The copyright page carries two dates. The Russian original is Izdatelstvo Mysl, Moscow, 1982; the English translation is Progress Publishers, 1985. The body of the book is a 1982 text, and it reads like one — the political narrative reaches its natural end at the first national conference of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan in March 1982, described at length and in the present tense of a thing just accomplished. But somebody went back over the last pages before the English went to press. The 1985 edition mentions PDPA membership figures for the summer of 1983, a Soviet–Afghan agreement of March 1984, statements by the US administration "in 1981-84", and, in its final paragraphs, the meeting at which "On March 14, 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev, General Secretary of the CC CPSU, received Babrak Karmal in the Kremlin." So the argument runs from 1982 for almost everything and from March 1985 for the last two pages. That matters, because those two pages are where the book has to answer for the intervening three years, and it does not.
What it is, though, is not a pamphlet. This is a full national history of Afghanistan from the Palaeolithic to the present, roughly 130,000 words, with 141 numbered references citing French, British, American, German and Afghan scholarship alongside the Russian. The foreword prints the division of labour, and the division is the most useful single fact about the volume:
A History of Afghanistan has been written by M. R. Arunova (Chapter Two, "Afghanistan in the Middle Ages"), Yu. V. Gankovsky ("The State of Durrani" in Chapter Three), V. G. Korgun (Chapter Four, "Afghanistan in Contemporary Times", except for the concluding part), V. M. Masson (Chapter One, "Ancient Afghanistan"), G. A. Muradov ("The Victory of the National-Democratic April Revolution and the Foundation of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan" in Chapter Four, jointly with G. A. Polyakov), and V. A. Romodin (Chapter Three, "Afghanistan in Modern Times", excluding the first part).
Gankovsky, who headed the group, was a serious orientalist; Masson was one of the leading archaeologists of Soviet Central Asia; Romodin and Masson had jointly written the two-volume Russian History of Afghanistan of 1964, which this book cites as a source. Read that list again and notice what it says. The scholarship and the propaganda in this volume have different authors, and the authors are named. Everything from the Stone Age to the fall of Daoud is by Masson, Arunova, Gankovsky, Romodin and Korgun. The final section — the April revolution, Amin, December 1979 and after — is by Muradov and Polyakov, who wrote nothing else in the book. It is not a case of scholars corrupted. It is a case of a scholarly manuscript with a section bolted on, and the seam is visible to the naked eye.
Say this plainly: chapters one to three are good. Not "good for Progress" — good.
Masson's ancient Afghanistan is working archaeology, not illustration. It moves through Dasht-i-Nawur, Darrah-i-Kur, the Kara-Kamar cave, Ak-kupruk and Mundigak on the evidence, cites Jean-Marie Casal's Mundigak excavations and the French work at Mehrgarh, discusses microlith typology and the stratigraphy of the northern caves, and is willing to say what is not known: "It is not as yet known if the territory of Afghanistan was one of the zones that were initially settled by man." A footnote corrects a previous Soviet dating of the Kara-Kamar lower layers — "A detailed analysis of man-made stone artifacts found there did not confirm this" — which is a small thing and the kind of small thing that only appears in a text written by someone who expects to be checked. The notes cite Dyakonov's "Aryans in the Middle East. The End of a Myth", a demolition of a racial thesis, and the botanist N. I. Vavilov on the wheat varieties of Herat and Qandahar. (Vavilov is cited without comment; he was arrested in 1940 and died of starvation in a Saratov prison in January 1943. The book that quotes his Afghan fieldwork was published by the state that killed him.)
Arunova's medieval chapter is the section of most value to an English reader, because it draws on a Soviet literature on the Pashtun lands that was largely untranslated. The treatment of the Roshaniyya — the sixteenth-century movement of Bayazid Ansari, its social base among the Khalils, Muhammadzais, Momands and Hughianis, its programme of dissolving the tribal division in favour of a territorial one, its half-century of war with the Mughals — is fuller than most English surveys of the period offer, and it does not romanticise: opponents were "often annihilated," their property confiscated and distributed among the sect. Then Khushhal Khan Khattak, then Qandahar and Herat, then Gankovsky on the Durrani state. The Marxist framework is there, and at points it is schematic — the "slave-owning system was giving way to nascent feudalism" is doing more asserting than showing — but it is a framework applied by people who know the material, not a substitute for knowing it.
Romodin on the nineteenth century is where a reader might expect the machine to switch on, and largely it does not. The First Anglo-Afghan War is narrated soberly and without gloating: the twenty-thousand-strong Army of the Indus with its thirty-eight thousand camp followers, the bribing of the Qandahar sardars, the storming of Ghazni where "The British troops took the city by storm and massacred its population," the British command's decision to quarter its troops in a marshy lowland outside Kabul, the rising. This is standard, competent military and political history.
More surprising is the candour about Russia. The tsarist state is not exempted from the analysis applied to Britain. Vitkevich's mission to Kabul in 1837 is described as an instrument of imperial policy that St Petersburg abandoned the moment it needed British goodwill over the Turco-Egyptian crisis and the Straits: "substantial changes were taking place in the policy of the Russian tsarist government which obstructed the pursuance of the former policy of countering British expansion". Stoletov's mission of 1878, the immediate pretext for the Second Anglo-Afghan War, is stated as fact — "In the spring of 1878 the tsarist government sent a diplomatic mission to Kabul headed by General Stoletov which was received with great honour" — and the book does not pretend Russia was an innocent bystander to the war that followed. On the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 it quotes Lenin's summary of what the two empires had done: "divide Persia, Afghanistan, Tibet (preparing for war against Germany)". The Great Game is described as a game with two players.
Two omissions mark the boundary.
The first is Panjdeh. On 30 March 1885 a Russian force under General Komarov attacked an Afghan detachment at the Tash-Kepri bridge on the Kushk; the Afghans were driven out and the Panjdeh oasis passed to Russia. The book describes the clash — and describes it as a British provocation. "The clash, which had in fact been provoked by the British colonialists, was far more detrimental to Britain than had been expected at the outset." It then moves directly to the London protocol of September 1885 and the final boundary protocol of July 1887 without ever saying that Afghanistan lost the territory. The word Panjdeh does not appear anywhere in this book. The one piece of Afghan land taken by Russia in the whole period is the one piece the reader is not told about.
The second is April 1929. The book gives a good account of the collapse of Amanullah's reforming monarchy, and then reports: "In April 1929, Ghulam Nabi Khan, former Afghan Ambassador in Moscow, gathered together a sizeable detachment of Uzbeks and Hazaras and seized Mazar-i-Sharif in a surprise attack." He did not gather it in Afghanistan. The column crossed from Soviet territory and was commanded by a Red Army officer, Vitaly Primakov, travelling under an Afghan name; it withdrew when Amanullah's cause was lost. The Soviet Union's first armed intervention in Afghanistan is in this book, correctly dated and correctly placed, with the Soviet part removed.
And yet the same chapter contains the best answer to the last section of the book, written by a different hand and fifty years earlier in subject.
Korgun's account of why Amanullah fell is materialist history of a high order, and it refuses every consoling explanation. The clergy and the khans opposed the reforms, yes — but so did the peasants, and the book explains why. "Some of the social measures of the Amanullah Khan government, in particular, abolition of various additional taxes and requisitions, elimination of slavery, and proclamation of religious equality eased feudal oppression on these sections of the population, but on the whole they had got no direct benefits from the reforms. On the contrary, at the initial stage of the country's transition to bourgeois development, their economic situation deteriorated seriously. The land tax increased to reach 45 per cent of the harvest cost by the end of the 1920s. For the most part, the government reforms were carried out at the expense of the peasants." The commutation of taxes in kind into cash drove peasants to the moneylender. And so: "the peasants, who were dependent on feudal lords and khans, came out in protest against reforms which made their conditions still worse, and against the new regime, constituting the main driving force of the anti-government movement."
That is the analysis. A modernising urban regime, moving faster than its social base, financing progress out of the countryside, and losing the countryside. It applies without alteration to 1978 and 1979 — to a land reform decreed from Kabul in six months, to literacy classes enforced by cadres who had never lived in a village, to a party that had taken power by military coup and had no rural organisation to speak of. Muradov and Polyakov's section does not make that argument, and could not, because it would have made the war explicable without the CIA.
The vocabulary is exact and it does not slip. In roughly 130,000 words, the phrase "Soviet troops" occurs twice. Here is the first:
The danger looming over the April Revolution and the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan was seen clearly not only by foreign political scientists, but also by Afghan leaders who, proceeding from the provisions of the Treaty of Friendship, Good-Neighbourliness and Cooperation, signed between the USSR and the DRA on December 5, 1978, and in keeping with Article 51 of the UN Charter, repeatedly requested the Soviet Union during 1979 to send Soviet Army units into the DRA. In response to these repeated requests a limited contingent of Soviet troops was sent to Afghanistan.
The second occurrence is the announcement that some of them left again: "All this made it possible to withdraw some of the units of the limited contingent of Soviet troops sent in the country in December 1979, as their presence there was no longer necessary." That is the whole of it. Six years of war, and the army fighting it is named twice, once arriving and once partly leaving.
The overthrow of Amin belongs to the Afghans: "On December 27, 1979, the patriotic majority in the PDPA, in the Revolutionary Council and in the armed forces overthrew the Amin regime." Karmal then simply appears, forming a government on 28 December; the book never explains how a man who had been shipped out as ambassador to Prague in 1978 came to be in Kabul that week. Unlike the Novosti volume of 1980, this book does not call Amin a CIA agent — a small mercy, and a real one, since that charge was never supported by a document then or since. Amin here is guilty of factionalism, of the murder of Taraki, and of "inadmissible methods in carrying out major reforms, such as the agrarian reform and the elimination of illiteracy". Which is the whole trick in a sentence: the reforms were right, the methods were Amin's, and therefore the insurgency has no domestic cause at all. Of April 1978 the book states flatly, "Therefore the revolution met actually no resistance."
Now the silences, which are the finding.
The insurgents are never called mujahideen; the word does not occur. Hekmatyar and Rabbani appear once each, in endnote 129 — which is, to its credit, accurate: it records that Hekmatyar "had emigrated to Pakistan in 1976, after an abortive attempt to stage an ultra-right mutiny against the Daoud regime," correctly establishing that the Islamist opposition predates the April revolution. But the leaders of the war being fought as the book went to press are confined to a footnote.
The refugees get one sentence, and it is about Amin: "The Amin administration subjected peaceful residents, specifically in the border regions, to unjustified repressions. Thousands of refugees fled across the Afghan borders." Thousands. By 1985 something between four and five million Afghans — roughly a quarter of the population — were living as refugees in Pakistan and Iran. The largest refugee movement in the world at the time is in this book as a subordinate clause about the previous year's leader.
The fighting is inventoried as damage, never as war. Twenty-five provinces are listed where "armed revolutionary units" — the translator's slip for counter-revolutionary — operated in 1980–83; schools burned, bridges blown, irrigation ruined, named individuals murdered. All of that happened. But there are no Soviet offensives, no bombing, no depopulated valleys, no Panjshir, no casualty figure of any kind on any side. The word war appears only as something done to Afghanistan from outside: "the unprovoked and undeclared war and aggression being waged against the DRA". The closest the book comes to acknowledging what was actually happening is a phrase it puts in Karmal's mouth at the March 1982 conference — "People are dying in Afghanistan because of the fratricidal war provoked by the counter-revolutionaries" — and even there the adjective does the work of the alibi. The UN-mediated talks that had been running since 1982 under Diego Cordovez are not mentioned; neither Geneva nor Cordovez appears. In 1985, seven years on, the book reports that the DRA "maintained diplomatic relations with almost eighty countries," and closes with Engels on revolutions passing "in five years over more ground than it would have done in a century under ordinary circumstances."
A reader should not come away thinking the opposite of this book is the truth. The old order was genuinely reactionary; the book's own figures on landlessness, usury and illiteracy are not inventions. The April 1978 decrees cancelling peasant debt, capping holdings at thirty jeribs, opening literacy courses to women and outlawing bride-price were real, and the people who taught village women to read were murdered for it. And the external backing was real, documented at the time by people with no interest in helping Moscow. Intercontinental Press of 30 May 1983 reported, from a New York Times story it named and dated, that "Beginning last December, the officials said, the Central Intelligence Agency was ordered to provide the Afghan insurgents for the first time with bazookas, mortars, grenade launchers, mines and recoilless rifles" — and noted, correctly, that "the U.S. intervention began well before Moscow dispatched its troops in December 1979." The same journal on 23 July 1984 reported the CIA spending some $75 million a year, the Saudi and Egyptian conduits, and a detail this book would have loved: that three weeks before a Soviet offensive in the Panjshir valley, US satellites detected the preparations and the rebels were warned. On the sponsors of the insurgency, Muradov and Polyakov were substantially right.
They were right about that and silent about everything else, which is why the section fails as history while chapters one to three succeed.
It would be false to say the anti-Stalinist left met this with one voice. It did not, and the record is public and awkward. In 1980 the Fourth International printed three rival resolutions side by side; the majority refused political support to the intervention but also refused to demand withdrawal, and only a minority said plainly that Soviet troops had overthrown Amin and installed Karmal and should leave. By the time this English edition appeared, the argument had been settled — and the settlement is recorded in the resolutions of the Twelfth World Congress of the Fourth International, held in January 1985 and printed that year in International Viewpoint. On the war then in its sixth year:
Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, the occupation of the country and the type of war that the USSR army is carrying out, have facilitated the international imperialist counter-offensive and the campaigns aiming to discredit socialism.
And on what the Soviet military apparatus was for, the same resolution set Afghanistan alongside Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland: the bureaucracy's armed power defends the workers' state, but also "defends the bureaucracy's own interests either against the workers of the workers states (Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland) or against the self-determination of peoples (Afghanistan)." It quoted Trotsky, from In Defense of Marxism, on the Kremlin's orientation "towards the Balkans, Persia, and Afghanistan: In other words, the Kremlin continues the policy of Czarist imperialism."
An interview in International Viewpoint no. 76, May 1985, is more direct still, and includes something rare in the literature of any tendency — an admission of error in one's own name: "This is what happened to us at the start of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan." The reason given is the one this book denies: "In Afghanistan, the great majority of the population was opposed to the Soviet intervention."
Even then, not everyone had moved. Intercontinental Press, by then edited in New York by the American Socialist Workers Party as it broke from the Fourth International, was still on the other side of the argument in 1986. Its issue of 24 March that year carried Doug Jenness attacking an open letter against Reagan's Nicaragua policy for the offence of also mentioning Afghanistan — "Why is the Soviet Union dragged into what is purported to be a protest against Reagan's Nicaragua policy?" Among the signers of that letter, as the same article notes, was Petr Uhl, a Czechoslovak revolutionary socialist who had by then served nine years in prison. A journal descended from the Trotskyist movement rebuking a man jailed by the bureaucracy for putting Kabul and Managua in the same sentence is a low point worth recording, and it is recorded here so that no one imagines the reply was unanimous or easy.
Two more things can be said with the benefit of what neither side then had. The Soviet Politburo took the decision to send troops on 12 December 1979, before any of the requests this book describes could have been made by the government that emerged on 28 December. And on 24 December 1989 the Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR declared the decision to send troops into Afghanistan deserving of moral and political condemnation. The publisher's own state repudiated the last forty pages of this book within four years of its appearing in English.
That is why it is worth reprinting whole rather than filleted. Read chapters one to three as what they are: a serious, well-sourced survey by real scholars, in places the fullest account available in English, honest even about the empire that paid for it — up to the point where honesty would have cost something. Then read the final section as a document of a different kind, and notice that its own book, a hundred pages earlier, already explained why the peasants of Afghanistan rise against governments that improve them at their own expense.