Telling and Retelling a War Story: Svetlana Alexievich and Alexander Prokhanov on the Soviet-Afghan War
Journal: Columbia Academic Commons (Columbia University)
Year: 2018

Unlike the Russian Civil War or Second World War, the Soviet-Afghan War (1979–1989) never acquired a stable, dominant narrative in Soviet or Russian culture. Even as the war was in progress, Soviet media revised its evaluation of key events and players to reflect the changing political tides through the 1980s. After the war ended, state leaders were distracted by the political turbulence of the 1990s, and the citizens—largely unaffected by the war on a personal level—were not particularly intere