Smoke, Mirrors, and Memories: Legacies of the Soviet-Afghan War

This book studies the complexities of the Soviet–Afghan War from several points of view, calling attention to the experiences of those involved. The late-1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan compounded the lack of support among Afghans for their country’s communist regime, which doomed the Soviet military undertaking from the start, and in turn contributed to the downfall of the Soviet system itself. Amid a battlefield of propaganda and disinformation from all sides that attempted to shape perceptions of the war, a clear undercurrent of opposition emerged within the USSR and grew over time, dominating the discourse during Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost (openness) reform in the late 1980s. In Smoke, Mirrors, and Memories, Jeffery W. Jones conveys a broad picture without the narrative illusion of a seamless story amid the fog of war, analyzing varied accounts relayed by a wide range of sources. He argues that an evolving narrative and discourse on the war in the latter half of the 1980s helped pave the way for the collapse of the USSR as disillusionment with the conflict grew within Soviet society.