Entangled Defeats: Vietnam in the Veterans' Press of the Soviet–Afghan War

Mere days after the Soviet military crossed into Afghanistan, launching a brutal war that would last nearly a decade, observers on both sides of the Iron Curtain were drawing analogies with the American War in Vietnam. As the Soviet war effort became increasingly bogged down, it was commonplace to speak of a “Soviet Vietnam.”

This paper examines the preconditions for the Afghanistan-Vietnam analogy within Soviet culture. It traces these to Soviet propaganda about the American war in Vietnam, which, the paper argues, produced a simplified template for military quagmire that became a touchstone for public considerations of the Soviet-Afghan War. While later critics of the Soviet war embraced the idea that the Soviet Union was mirroring the American debacle in Vietnam, Soviet patriots and a pro-war faction of the Communist Party leadership struggled to define the Soviet-Afghan War in diametrical opposition to Vietnam. The origins of both of these tendencies are to be found in the preceding decades, when Soviet political discourse delineated the contours of illegitimate military intervention, of an imperial adventurism waged against an overmatched yet heroic people fighting to throw off the shackles of foreign domination.

In short, the paper argues that it was largely the Soviet Union’s own official messaging about the Vietnam War, which produced a readymade template for quagmire, that influenced later Soviet attitudes toward their country’s involvement in Afghanistan.