ACTIONS AGAINST THE SOVIET INTERVENTION IN AFGHANISTAN IN 1979–1989 IN THE UKRAINIAN SSR (BASED ON MATERIALS FROM THE SBU BRANCH ARCHIVE)

Abstract

Based on documents from the Branch Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine, actions against the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in 1979–1989 in the Ukrainian SSR were studied, their possible influence on the public mood of the republic's citizens and their impact on the socio-political situation in the USSR were clarified. It has been established that information messages and reports from the KGB of the Ukrainian SSR indicate that some citizens of the republic condemned the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and were prepared to take active measures against it. Such actions can be divided into several groups. The first and most numerous group consisted of the production of anonymous letters, leaflets, inscriptions in public places, etc. The second can be defined as calls for protest actions (no such actions were recorded). The third group consisted of actions by individual citizens, which can be defined as hooliganism, but which also testified to their attitude towards the foreign policy of the USSR, in particular, towards the ‘Afghan question’. However, despite the large number of such actions, their impact on public opinion and, even more so, on the Soviet authorities was insignificant. As can be seen from the documents, the leaflets were produced in small quantities and could not compete with the official media, which had a much more effective influence on the political mood of the citizens of the Soviet Union. Judging by the same documents, which clearly recorded the dates and names of those involved, these were isolated cases on the scale of the Ukrainian SSR, to which the Soviet special services responded promptly. It can be assumed that most of the individuals involved were in some way connected to the war in Afghanistan, so their actions were a kind of reaction to it. The rest of the republic's citizens were indifferent to the events in Afghanistan. At the same time, the presence of even a small number of such active opponents of the Kremlin's policies was critical to the growth of protest sentiment, which became increasingly noticeable from the mid-1980s onwards. It can therefore be argued that the anti-war actions of the citizens of the Ukrainian SSR in connection with the Soviet aggression in Afghanistan were one of the factors in the crisis of the Soviet system and brought Ukraine closer to independence in 1991.