Had a good conversation on the train home with one of the lovely Ukrainian codeheads from work (actually she's from Moldova, but the rest of that crowd is Ukrainian). We were talking about politics and she said it's possible that the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 was Brezhnev's gambit to resuscitate the failing Soviet economy and gather public support behind the state in a time of war.
Brezhnev must have known by 79 that his economy was almost irretrievably foxed. Living standards in the Soviet Union had started to decline for the first time since the Great Patriotic War, and in the long term, it would have eventually spelled the death of the state. I can see why it may have made sense to Brezhnev's people to start a "splendid little war," to temporarily jumpstart the economy on a charlie-bump of military spending and patriotic fervor. I just never thought of it that way before (I guess I'd assumed, like most Westerners, that he must have been looking outward rather than inward when he began that adventure). Brezhnev probably couldn't have even imagined the nightmare his little gambit would turn itself into over the next decade. And the world is still struggling with the consequences.
If it's true, it's makes kind of a scary parallel, no?
Posted by case at February 2, 2004 09:47 PM