Friday, October 12, 2012

SOVIET INVASION OF AFGHANISTAN A CASE OF MISSION CREEP, ACCORDING TO NEW BOOK AND ORIGINAL SOVIET DOCUMENTS

SOVIET INVASION OF AFGHANISTAN A CASE OF MISSION CREEP, ACCORDING TO NEW BOOK AND ORIGINAL SOVIET DOCUMENTS

THE DEAD END PUBLISHED IN ENGLISH FOR THE FIRST TIME

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 396

Posted - October 13, 2012

Edited by Svetlana Savranskaya and Malcolm Byrne

For more information contact:
Svetlana Savranskaya - 202/994-7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu

http://www.nsarchive.org

Washington, D.C., October 13, 2012 -- Contrary to U.S. myths of a strategic Soviet offensive towards warm water ports on the Persian Gulf or Indian Ocean, it was "mission creep" that led the Soviet Union into its ill-fated invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, according to a new, richly documented account of early Soviet engagement in Afghanistan, published in English and in Russian today by the National Security Archive at www.nsarchive.org.

The groundbreaking book by two Russian authors--the historian and journalist Vladimir Snegirev and the veteran of Soviet foreign intelligence Valery Samunin--appears today in English under the title The Dead End: The Road to Afghanistan, together with 21 key documents from the National Security Archive's collection of Soviet and U.S. secret files on the Soviet war in Afghanistan and seven historic photographs from the period immediately before the invasion.

The Archive's posting of the Russian original, Virus A: How We Got Infected by the Invasion of Afghanistan, appears on our Russian Page. It includes more than 150 original Russian-language documents from Soviet-era files gathered by the Archive--most of which are not available in Moscow archives today--and 42 photographs from the period that were obtained by the authors.


Read today's posting at the National Security Archive website - http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB396/

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Unredacted, the Archive blog - http://nsarchive.wordpress.com/

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