The Andrei Sakharov Foundation

Ending the Unwinnable War — A Thread in the Tapestry

On 15th May 1988, following the Geneva Accords, the Soviet Union began its military withdrawal from Afghanistan. It took another nine months, until 15th February 1989, to complete the evacuation of all troops.

A decade-long war had proved a misadventure. Back in 1979, an internal civil conflict prompted Soviet intervention to stabilize a failing client state — but this triggered a robust American response, rapidly turning the country into a major proxy battlefield, with massive American-led funding and arming of local resistance fighters, the Mujahideen. Soviet actions were reckless, but it was the American response that gave rise to the Taliban and caused even greater suffering for the Afghan nation and the world.

Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader from the 1964 coup displacing Khrushchev until his death in 1982, is credited with the "Brezhnev Doctrine" — the foreign policy tenet that once any country became socialist, it would not be allowed to return to capitalism. This put immense pressure on the Soviet Union to prop up failing regimes. In Afghanistan's case, however, Brezhnev foresaw a very real possibility of a Vietnam-style quagmire and was reluctant to intervene. On Christmas Day 1979, he finally yielded to Politburo hardliners, making an emotional decision, triggered by a political assassination in Kabul, to invade.

Over the following decade, up to two million Afghans were killed and the country's economy destroyed. Soviet troop losses were limited to around 13,000, but the deeply unpopular war opened deep cracks in the Soviet regime. The direct economic cost of the war was modest — but the structural dysfunction of the Soviet economy, long masked by the high oil prices of the 1970s, became fully exposed when oil prices collapsed, draining Soviet foreign reserves.

Andrei Sakharov strongly denounced the invasion from the outset, labeling it a "criminal adventure." He called on the international community to pressure the Soviet Union, including supporting a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics. His outspoken opposition — framing the invasion as a threat to world peace and a violation of international law — struck the already frayed nerves of Brezhnev and the Politburo. They channeled their rising anxiety toward Sakharov, exiling him to Gorky in January 1980.

He continued his calls to end the war from that internal exile. Returning in 1989 and elected to the People's Congress, Sakharov again forcefully condemned the Afghan invasion from the public tribune. The Soviet apparatchiks — the majority among the Congress's deputies — listened with soured faces, perhaps dimly aware that the unwinnable war had been but one thread in a tapestry of interlocking failures that would soon bring the USSR itself to an end.

Сахаров о войне в Афганистане А.Д. Сахаров отвечает на нападки во время 1 съезда народных депутатов СССР в 1989 году.