Hind Gunship
Would the USSR still exist if it hadn't invaded Afghanistan?
The US, Saudi Arabia and China spent well over a billion dollars arming and training the Afghan fighters over several years. Eventually they provided the only means Afghans ever had for downing Hind gunships.
The expensive, protracted war demoralized the USSR and the Red Army, destroying an uninterrupted pattern: Where the Red Army goes, it stays.
Was the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan the trigger for the dissolution of the USSR?
Why, or why not?
http://www.amazon.com/Charlie-Wilsons-War-Extraordinary-Operation/dp/0871138549?tag=dogpile-20
No, it almost certainly wouldn't still exist. What brought the USSR to its knees was Reagan's 'dollar for ruble' arms race. If Reagan just held his nerve, the end was inevitable. The Soviet economy simply couldn't withstand a head-on attack from the world's most powerful currency.
I wouldn't say Afghanistan was the trigger. The writing was already on the wall. Hungary, Poland, and increasingly the USSR itself, had alcoholism problems the rest of the world had never known before as people sank into despair under a sterile system going nowhere.
But the Red Army was the one thing the Soviet government could hold up as an undeniable success - and it had been broken! Unfavourable comparisons with Thatcher, who had recently fought a war 12,000 miles from home and won proved a significant accelerator to a growing feeling.. Probably for the first time since 1917, substantial numbers of soldiers were coming home agreeing with the already growing number of civilian dissidents. They almost certainly added a new drive and vibrancy to dissident groups on the street.
And then there was Reagan. That swine just would NOT go away! A system already morally bankrupt was creeping ever closer to bankrupt - actual. There's no way it could have survived.
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