The Bleeding Wound: The Soviet War in Afghanistan and the Collapse of the Soviet System by Yaacov Ro’i

This author’s prolific scholarship combines nuanced argumentation with an encylopedic knowledge of late-socialist Soviet society, notably in the realms of foreign relations, nationalities policy, and religion. In this exhaustively researched book, Ro’i turns his attention to the Soviet–Afghan War (1979–1989), a conflict that Eduard Shevardnadze, the USSR’s last foreign minister, termed “a sin” in a 1990 speech to the Supreme Soviet (115). Although a number of excellent monographs on the subject have been published in recent years, Ro’i offers something new. In 1992/3, when a conflict that killed at least 15,000 Soviet soldiers and more than a million Afghans was recent news, he and a small team of interviewers conducted surveys and interviews with hundreds of former Soviet citizens, most of them war veterans, across eleven Soviet republics and among emigrés in Israel. Incorporating elements of qualitative and quantitative data and analysis, the result is a source base rich and...