Упрощенная HTML-версия
ation to enforce his conditions on the Bolsheviks: no political propaganda, extension of financial,
economic and military aid as promised, etc.
The new relationships between the Soviet Union and Afghanistan were further consolidated by
border settlements and the visit of Khrushchev and Bulganin to Kabul late in 1955 with an ab-
solutely pragmatic aim of forming a friendly regime in Afghanistan to secure the southern bor-
ders of the Soviet Union.
For many years, the Soviet Union helped Afghanistan train engineers and technicians by allotting
free places in Soviet educational establishments and paying stipends to the Afghan students. In
the 1970s, thousands of local specialists engaged in the country's national economy received
higher or secondary education in the Soviet Union.
Turbulence in Afghanistan which many superficial observers took for an island of stability in
the ocean of international storms was unfolding amid the rapidly worsening situation in the re-
gion and at the Afghan borders. Tension between China and India; the Indo-Pak conflict; the
degrading situation in the Middle East shaped the political situation at the regional level, while
the East-West confrontation at the global level was caused among other things by consolidation
of NATO.
Neither Moscow nor Washington could have expected that in a short while Afghanistan would
move to the frontlines of international politics to become the stumbling block in the relationships
between the two superpowers.
I VISITED Kabul in spring 2014 as member of the delegation of the Central Election Com-
mittee of Russia to observe the presidential and provincial elections in Afghanistan, which, as
many hoped, would open a new page in the country's political history. I found that much had
changed in Kabul during the tragic decades. It became larger yet the contrast between the narrow
and dirty bypasses of the city's old part and the multistoried buildings which sprang here and
there without much logic or order in the center spoke of the sharp and dramatic turns of the
last decades.
http://interaffairs.ru