Is there any further reading on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan beyond 'Afgantsy'?

by Das_Fish

I have been writing an essay for some schoolwork assessing the failure that was the intervention in Afghanistan, answering the question 'Why did the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan fail?'.

The idea of this assignment is to encourage independent research. However, I have run into a wall regarding sources. The lion's share of my information has been drawn from 'Afgantsy: the Russians in Afghanistan 1979-89', and that is reflected in the citations (16 out of 20 citations are from Afgantsy). Are there any other similarly comprehensive articles or journals about the topic?

rocketsocks
  • "Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War" by Svetlana Alexievich. Interviews and accounts from Soviet soldiers and civilians on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
  • "The Lessons of Modern War, Volume III: The Afghan and Falklands Conflicts" by Cordesman and Wagner. More of a set of case studies but it includes a lot of details on the Soviet/Afghan war. It has an extensive bibliography but almost exclusively of western non-primary sources (the book was published in 1990).
EdHistory101

Hi - we as mods have approved this thread, because while this is a homework question, it is asking for clarification or resources, rather than the answer itself, which is fine according to our rules. This policy is further explained in this Rules Roundtable thread and this META Thread.

As a result, we'd also like to remind potential answerers to follow our rules on homework - please make sure that your answers focus appropriately on clarifications and detailing the resources that OP could be using.

Additionally, while users may be able to help you out with specifics relating to your question, we also have plenty of information on /r/AskHistorians on how to find and understand good sources in general. For instance, please check out our six-part series, "Finding and Understanding Sources", which has a wealth of information that may be useful for finding and understanding information for your essay.

Jon_Beveryman

I'm going to link you to what I wrote the last time this came up.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ugpe6v/are_there_any_good_historical_books_detailing_the/i78qwk3/?context=3