I can speak to Afghanistan. At the beginning of the war, few people inside the USSR knew the extent of the Soviet Union’s involvement. Media and propaganda denied that Russian troops were in combat roles, claiming they were working as advisors. Afghan veterans recalled reading newspapers and watching reports, feeling betrayed that they sacrifice was being covered up and unsure of what to tell new recruits who were destined for the battlefield. As part of glasnost, Gorbachev’s reforms to be more transparent, accounts and stories started to trickle from Afghanistan about draft-dodging, drug abuse on the front, and the cost of war. Gorbachev wanted to portray the United States’ involvement backing the mujahideen in news reports, yet Russians looked at the earlier denials of combat instead of US involvement. However, at this point that glasnost started (1986), the USSR had already decided to withdraw from Afghanistan and so the domestic unhappiness did not play a factor there.

However, later on, in the 1991 August Putsch, Boris Yeltsin rallied Moscow youth around the new Russian democracy and Afghan veterans turned out to defend the fledgling government. They supposedly constituted one third of the civilian barricade defenders, organizing barricades and pelting troop carriers with Molotov cocktails. One veteran noted “In Afghanistan, I didn’t know what I was fighting for…but here we are defending our freedom, our lives, and the lives of our children.” That these veterans turned out and violently defended a new and unproven government shows the level of distrust in the younger generation of Russians ready for change. They wanted to do away with the conservative and corrupt Soviet government that had pushed them to fight a bloody and drawn out war in Afghanistan. Other publications called the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan as a fruitless adventure that erased much of the glory of military service. So much that, later during crisis in Azerbaijan, mothers cried they did not want their sons to go to a “second Afghanistan”.

Sources:

Mark Galeotti, Afghanistan: The Soviet Union’s Last War (Portland: Frank Cass & Co Ltd, 1995.)

John Dunlop, The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1993.)

Bernard Gwertzman and Michael Kaufman, The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Empire (New York, Random House, 1992.)