Full cite at http://www.workers.org/marcy/1991/sm910117.html Afghanistan and bourgeois pacifism It was precisely then that Shevardnadze publicly brought up the subject of Afghanistan in a speech attacking the Soviet role there. While supposedly aimed at the Brezhnev leadership, it nevertheless undermined the Soviet armed forces.
Shevardnadze presented the Afghanistan issue in the framework of democracy. The anti-imperialist struggle of the oppressed people, to which the USSR had been pledged since the days of the revolution, was all but denigrated. In fact, the bourgeois restorationists for whom Shevardnadze spoke actually identified the principle of revolutionary solidarity as the problem in their increasing attacks on the Soviet Union's history of anti-imperialist aid over the decades.
In the public discussion about the Soviet role in Afghanistan and the difficulties encountered in the Afghanistan struggle, it was all but forgotten that the U.S., Britain, France, West Germany, Pakistan and also China were arrayed against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and still are.
When the foreign minister of the USSR discussed Afghanistan, he should first have noted the Soviet Union was called on for aid by a sister country. There was an imminent danger of counter-revolution, which among other things was a direct threat to the USSR because of Afghanistan's geographical proximity. So the Soviet intervention had a defense aspect.
Instead, Shevardnadze's comments were in the spirit of bourgeois pacifism, and they helped open the door to the bourgeois "independence" forces then rising in Eastern Europe. His attack was devoid of any progressive content, any revolutionary spirit. It was a move to humiliate the military forces and a blatant appeal to win favor with imperialism.
None of this--including glasnost--evoked a lively spirit of revolutionary defensism of the USSR. Instead, it degenerated into bourgeois pacifism.
It got to the point where Lt. General V. Serebriannikov, a well-known military publicist, wrote an article accusing "certain writers and publicists" of expressing "decadent and cowardly thoughts which sow the seeds of pacifism." In an analysis in the Summer 1988 issue of Foreign Affairs, F. Stephen Larrabee, a member of the National Security Council under Jimmy Carter, wrote, "Under the guise of glasnost, he [Serebriannikov] charged, these writers `virtually compete with one another to put forward the most sensational and venomous revelations.' "
-------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20011119/a3aecbe2/attachment.htm>