From the beginning of the Soviet invasion in December 1979 to Mikhail Gorbachev's rise to power in 1985 the Soviet Union actively ignored the conflict as best as the could, and when they did acknowledge it's existence they mostly focused on the more positive aspects.
When the war began in December of 1979, Brezhnev and his leadership’s use of their state run media platform was not to use it to put the war under a spotlight and to paint the Red Army and the conflict as just, but instead “throughout the Brezhnev years, soviet media and official pronouncements referred to the Afghan conflict as a ‘problem around Afghanistan,’ and chose to ignore the very real Army contingent in the country. The Brezhnev regime heavily censored the media and cracked down on the use of “war” and words attributing towards that connotation on public media, with one Soviet radio commentator being dismissed from his job when he “used the word ‘invasion’ for the Soviet military presence in Afghanistan.”(1) That’s not to say there wasn’t a known presence, but in the early years of the war when Soviet media reported on the conflict, they often ignored the presence of the Red Army and instead diverted focus and public attention on the Afghanistan government and the Cold War, highlighting the support that Pakistan, America, and China were supplying to the mujahedeen1. When the Soviet media did talk about the Red Army, they vehemently denied that Soviet forces were in an active warzone. On February 5, 1980 Pravda, the official newspaper of the Communist Party, quotes the head of the International Department of the Central Committee of the CPSU Boris Ponomarev as saying that the “Afghan authorities and the Afghan population display a friendly attitude towards the Soviet servicemen,”1 while also doubling down on the claim that “no clashes are taking place between Afghans and our soldiers.” Instead of combat, photographs showing troops hard at work “planting trees, restoring mosques, and building hospitals, schools, residential complexes, and roads”1 were published as Soviet media continued to maintain that “the Afghanistan war was being fought by the Afghan armed forces, and that the Soviet army was only supporting them from the rear.” This trend of secrecy and ignorance would officially continue until 1985, however there is evidence of reports of politicians alluding to the conflict , and stories about the war began to “appear in the army newspapers as early as 1983,” with “1984 mark[ing] the arrival of stories on the plight of the wounded Afghantsy.”(2)
Change would come in 1985 at the accession of Mikhail Gorbachev when he reintroduced glastnost into Soviet society. A new age of openness in Soviet media began after “a June 7, 1985 directive from the CC of the CPSU ordered a change in coverage of Afghanistan,” directing Soviet “media at all levels to report on the activities of Soviet forces in Afghanistan”3 This is including Red Army participation in combat, especially their heroism, the care given to Afghantsy who were wounded during the war, their awards that were given to them, and recognition for the war dead and aid for their families, while also still needing military censor approval and only being allowed to speak about soldiers wounded or killed once a month.3 While certainly a positive aspect for the soldiers wanting recognition and for the civilians wanting more information about the conflict, as the media began to accept glastnost they also began to present a very different war to the Soviet population. Glastnost opened the door for scrutiny of the conflict which in turn shattered the Soviet public’s view of the invincible Red Army that was incapable of committing no wrong, instead they were introduced to the reality of the war in Afghanistan. However, Glastnost also opened up these outlets to scrutiny over the way they represented the war to the Soviet public, with one article “citing a letter of an angry father whose son had died in Afghanistan, it wrote: “our mass media…reflects events occurring in Afghanistan superficially,””1 while other articles “carried letters to the editor criticizing the melodramatic and uninformative media coverage of the war,” One Ukrainian mother, whose two sons were drafted, was published in a Ukrainian Youth Newspaper criticizing the way the media had handled the conflict, while also interestingly “complain[ing] that it was only the sons of the ordinary workers who were sent into battle.” 1
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