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The Soldiers Who Wouldn't Stay Silent: How the Afgantsy Cracked the System
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
A million Soviet veterans came home from Afghanistan carrying direct evidence that the state had lied — and unlike dissidents, they couldn't be dismissed. This chapter traces how the Afgantsy broke the party's monopoly on organised life and opened the first real cracks in the Soviet information order.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
There's a question that rarely gets asked about the Soviet collapse. Not who lost the Cold War, or which reform came too late.
The whole structure of Soviet power rested on a specific bargain. The state would provide security, employment, housing, and purpose.
The key point here is what the Soviet state did with all of this. It hid it.
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union had always maintained a monopoly on organized life. Every association, every club, every professional body existed under party oversight.
The command economy had a fundamental problem that no one inside the system had been able to solve. Central planning worked reasonably well when the task was simple: build more steel, produce more coal, mobilize resources toward a clear industrial target.
Here's what Gorbachev miscalculated. He thought he could control the aperture.
While all of this was unfolding in Moscow, the non-Russian republics of the Soviet Union were paying close attention. The Soviet federation was, as we've discussed in earlier episodes, a theoretical structure that masked a reality of centralized Russian control.
Eastern Europe was already moving. Poland had held partially free elections in June of nineteen eighty-nine, and Solidarity, the independent trade union movement that had challenged communist rule since nineteen eighty, won overwhelmingly.
In August of nineteen ninety-one, a group of Communist Party hardliners, including the head of the KGB and the defense minister, moved to stop the unraveling. They detained Gorbachev at his vacation dacha in Crimea and announced that he was ill and temporarily incapacitated.
The Afgantsy didn't cause the Soviet collapse by themselves. Nothing that complex has a single cause.
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