Strange Rebels by Caryl Christian

Author:Caryl, Christian [Caryl, Christian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780465033355
Publisher: Basic Books

16

Back to the Future

The regime in Warsaw was, of course, deeply entrenched. It had enjoyed thirty-five years of unchallenged rule. It was Stalin himself, backed by the full force of the Red Army and the Soviet secret police, who had installed the Polish Communists in power in 1944. (A Soviet citizen and Red Army general, Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, even served as the Polish minister of defense for a few years.) The Kremlin’s careful engineering of the new administration in Poland was part of a broader, carefully conceived strategy for the Soviet domination of East Central Europe that had been tacitly endorsed by the Western Allies at Yalta. So the Sovietization of the countries in the region followed a clear and uniform plan; there was very little that was spontaneous or ad hoc about the process. Because the Polish Communists and their colleagues elsewhere took direct orders from their bosses in Moscow, all of them followed the same clearly articulated policy line; Stalin did not tolerate factional disputes among his proxies.

The contrast between this story of Communist rule in Poland and its Afghan equivalent could not have been starker. The Afghan Communists rose to power in their slapdash coup of April 1978 thanks to the improvisational initiative of Hafizullah Amin, who wasn’t even the head of his own party. President Mohammed Daoud’s arrest of other Communist leaders had prompted Amin to activate his far-flung network of contacts in the militia and the security services in a reactive strike against Daoud’s government. As a result, the coup’s success owed far more to Daoud’s own weaknesses than to any careful preparation by the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA). Nor did the newly victorious Afghan Communists have a clearly thought-out strategy for the path ahead. For the PDPA leader, Nur Mohammed Taraki, his sudden release from prison and his ascent to the position of head of state were equally unexpected.

The same off-the-cuff style applied to the PDPA’s headlong implementation of its radical reform program. The Communists tried to push through rapid land reform in a country where there were virtually no formalized deeds or cadastral surveys, virtually ensuring chaos.1 They abolished mortgages and other traditional debt relationships without providing a new system of financing to replace them. And they vowed to open up their new institutions to women, an innovation that struck many ordinary Afghans as an affront to Islamic values. (The new PDPA rulers reinforced this sense that they had little respect for religion by replacing the old flag, with its prominent green stripe symbolizing the centrality of Islam, with a new revolutionary flag in Bolshevik red that had no space for religious imagery.) These ill-considered measures predictably sparked widespread resistance within conservative Afghan society.

The April 1978 coup was neither planned nor desired by the men in Moscow; they learned about it from news reports. They had little choice but to acquiesce. As the new regime in Kabul settled into place, its Soviet sponsors watched in consternation as the Afghan leaders recklessly pushed their agenda on a reluctant populace.

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