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Coverage of the military actions of the USSR in the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan in the Soviet scientific, scientific-popular and non-fiction literature

Introduction . Soviet aggression in Afghanistan is covered in more than a thousand articles, monographs, essays. Most researchers ignore popular science and non-fiction works. However, they formed the idea of Afghan war in the mass consciousness and reflected the official Soviet policy towards it. The aim of the article is to investigate the evolution of coverage of the Soviet Union’s involvement in the Afghan crisis, to find out the role of censorship and propaganda in this. At the core of the research methodology is the method of a content analysis of historical sources, problem-chronological, typological, comparative methods. Main results and conclusions . From December 1979 to mid-1985, the decisive factor was the complete silence of the participation of a limited contingent of Soviet troops in the war in Afghanistan. From the mid-1985 to the late 1980s, there was a partial relaxation of censorship restrictions, which made it possible to get into publications half-truth. It was only in the last years of the Soviet Union that there was a qualitative transition to a scientific and impartial study of the USSR’s participation in Afghan events, initiated by the works of D. Gay and V. Snigeryov, as well as O. Lyakhovskyi and V. Zabrodin. The predominance of publications and studies of the official version of events led, on the one hand, to the formation of a distorted view of war in Afghanistan by Soviet society, and, on the other, contributed to the decline of confidence in power and ultimately accelerated the collapse of the communist regime in the USSR. Originality . More than a hundred scientific, popular science and non-fiction works published in the USSR in 1980-1991 that deal with Soviet aggression in the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan have been investigated in the article. The content of the regulatory framework which determined the contents and nature of the information has been analyzed that could be published on the pages of Soviet editions. On this basis, the evolution of the official version of the Soviet Union’s involvement in the Afghan crisis has been traced and reflected in scientific literature and journalism. The role of censorship and the propaganda orientation of most publications have been established, which makes it possible to define them as part of the internal policy of the Soviet leadership to propagate the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The stages during which the nature of Afghan-related publications was altered have been highlighted.