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Evening with
summer school lecturers, September 2007 |
Alexander Antonovich Lyakhovsky rose
to the rank of Major General in the Soviet army, and in retirement
became an eminent military historian and the leading Russian
authority on the Soviet war in Afghanistan. During the war, he
worked in the General Staff of the USSR Armed Forces, and in
1987-1989 he served as personal aide to General of the Army
Valentin Varennikov, the head of the USSR Defense Ministry
Operations Group in Afghanistan and President Najibullah’s top
military adviser. General Lyakhovsky’s position provided him
with unique insight into Soviet military decision-making and
operations in Afghanistan.
For the past 20 years, Alexander Lyakhovsky
conducted pioneering research in the archives of the Russian
Defense Ministry, the Archive of the General Staff, and the
Russian Military Archive, and published his findings and original
documents in multiple scholarly and popular media. His books
included Tragediya I Doblest Afgana (Afghan Tragedy and
Valor, 1995), Plamya Afgana (Afghan Fire, 1999),
Chechenskaya Tragediya Rossii (Russia’s Chechen Tragedy,
2002), Zacharovanye Svobodoi: Tainy Kavkazskih Voin,
(Charmed with Freedom: Secrets of the Wars in the Caucasus,
2006), and Grazhdanin, Politik, Voin: Pamyati Shakha Masuda
(Citizen, Politician, Fighter: In Memory of Shah Masoud, 2007).
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In the
audience, Septmeber 2007 |
General Lyakhovsky’s scholarly work
represents the most comprehensive attempt to document and analyze
the Soviet narrative of the war in Afghanistan. His books and
articles published hundreds of primary sources that had never
before been available to scholars, including reports of Soviet
representatives of the USSR Defense Ministry, the KGB, and Soviet
military commanders. The books also included extensive interviews
with Soviet military officers and representatives of secret
services. Among the subjects he covered in detail were the Soviet
efforts to stabilize the situation in Afghanistan in 1980 while
keeping the mission limited to the protection of government
buildings and main installations, the expansion of the mission to
include combat operations, the emergence of the Mujahadeen
resistance, and Soviet efforts secretly to negotiate with the
rebel leaders, most notably, with the legendary Ahmad Shah Masoud.
Alexander Antonovich worked in partnership with the National
Security Archive for nearly 15 years to open the secret history of
the Afghan war and to bring scholarly scrutiny to Soviet military
history. He actively participated in the Carter-Brezhnev Project
(organized by Jim Blight and janet Lang of Brown University’s
Watson Institute, together with the Archive) starting with the
Oslo conference co-sponsored with the Norwegian Nobel Institute in
September 1995, and in the conference “Toward an International
History of the War in Afghanistan, 1979-1989,” organized by the
Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson
International Center for Scholars, with the Archive, in April 2002
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On the Black
Sea, September 2007 |
General Lyakhovsky was an invaluable participant in the program of
the summer schools for Russian regional faculty and graduate
students held by the Archive annually for five years from 2002 to
2007 in Gelendzhik, Russia, in partnership with Kuban State
University. At the summer school and in the conferences,
Alexander Antonovich was always the soul of the group with his
insightful analysis and characteristic openness, and his
larger-than-life personality especially marked the evenings, when
he sang his extraordinary soldiers’ songs about Afghanistan, told
stories and jokes and enveloped everybody around him in his unique
personal warmth and wonderful sense of humor. He shared his books
and documents and stories with summer school students who followed
him everywhere. All of us who had the great privilege of working
with him will always remember his broad warm smile, his enormous
generosity, and his room-filling voice, that also filled our
hearts.
Ambassador Rodric
Braithwaite’s Tribute to Lyakhovsky
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Summer school
2007 |
Aleksandr Lyakhovsky, who died on 3 February, was a most generous
man, a most generous scholar, and a universally respected expert
on the political and military history of the Soviet war in
Afghanistan. I first met him in 2006, when I was beginning
research on that subject for a book. Knowing very little about me,
he nevertheless introduced me to a great many veterans of the war,
some now in very senior positions. His massive history of the war
in Afghanistan,
The Tragedy and the Glory of the Afghan War,
became my constant guide and point of reference. It is an
encyclopaedic account, which he continually revised as new
documents became available, often as a result of his efforts to
make public things which otherwise would not have seen the light
of day. No doubt new documents will become available, which will
shed more light on the details of Soviet decisionmaking before and
during the war. But no future scholar will be able to ignore
Aleksandr Lyakhovsky’s groundbreaking work.
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Summer school,
September 2007 |
Lyakhovsky served in Afghanistan for a number
of years, and as a professional soldier he naturally reflected the
point of view of the army, both in his writing and in private
conversation. Like many other honorable Soviet officers, he felt
that the army had been given an impossible task by the politicians
who sent it into Afghanistan in 1979, and that those same
politicians shamefully failed to recognize the army’s achievements
and sufferings when it finally withdrew. But though he expressed
these feelings with passion, they never affected the objectivity
of his historical analysis.
I did not know Aleksandr Lyakhovsky long
enough to presume to call him a friend. But he was a vivid
personality, and I feel his loss keenly. He had a great deal more
to give both the people around him and the cause of historical
truth and justice to which he had devoted himself.
-Rodric Braithwaite, British Ambassador to
Moscow, 1988-1992
Video1:Lyakhovsky
signing Russian songs1
Video 2:Lyakhovsky
singing Russian songs
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With
summer school students |
