Afghanistan and the shape of the 20th century

"Two conditions, at least, are necessary for a victorious social revolution - highly developed productive forces and a proletariat adequately prepared for it. But in 1871 both of these conditions were lacking. French capitalism was still poorly developed, and France was at that time mainly a petty-bourgeois country (artisans, peasants, shopkeepers, etc.). On the other hand, there was no workers' party; the working class had not gone through a long school of struggle and was unprepared, and for the most part did not even clearly visualise its tasks and the methods of fulfilling them. There was no serious political organisation of the proletariat, nor were there strong trade unions and co-operative societies..."

V I Lenin, In Memory of the Commune, April 1911

"The predominating type among the present 'communist' bureaucrats is the political careerist, and in consequence the polar opposite of the revolutionist. Their ideal is to attain in their own countries the same position that the Kremlin oligarchy gained in the USSR. They are not the revolutionary leaders of the proletariat but aspirants to totalitarian rule. They dream of gaining success with the aid of this same Soviet bureaucracy and its GPU. They view with admiration and envy the invasion of Poland, Finland, the Baltic states, Bessarabia by the Red Army, because these invasions immediately bring about the transfer of power into the hands of the local Stalinist candidates for totalitarian rule".

Leon Trotsky, The Comintern and the GPU, August 1940.

"Comrade Taraki had appraised the Afghan society on a scientific basis and had intimated [to] the party since the 1973 [Daud] coup that it was possible in Afghanistan to wrest... political power through a shortcut, [inasmuch] as the classical way in which the productive forces undergo different stages to build a society based on scientific socialism would take a long time. This shortcut could be utilised by working extensively in the armed forces. Previously the army was considered as the tool of dictatorship and despotism of the ruling class and it was not imaginable to use it before toppling its employer. However, Comrade Taraki suggested this too should be wrested in order to topple the ruling class." From the official biography of Noor Mohammed Taraki, a leader of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, published in August 1978.

The "Great Saur Revolution" - "Saur" means April - was in fact a military-Stalinist coup d'etat. It put a very tiny Stalinist party, the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, which may have numbered only three to four thousand members, subdivided into two groups murderously at odds with each other, in a position to attempt to make a "revolution from above".

In some of its features the "Great Saur Revolution" was unique. The PDPA had first won over the decisive layers of airforce and army officers and then seized the state. There was considerable bloodshed in the April 1978, but it was inflicted by one section of the old state on another, in a conflict involving only the military.

Nonetheless, in its essentials, what happened in Afghanistan between April 1978 and the Russian invasion of Christmas 1979 reprised, in a concentrated and intensified way, the experience that, together with the convulsions of world capitalism, shaped the history of the 20th century - the many attempts to make anti-capitalist revolutions from above in unripe societies.

Afghanistan's Great Saur Revolution was the last of the 20th century Stalinist revolutions from above* - at one and the same time the epitome, caricature, and reductio ad absurdum of all the others, in Eastern Europe, China and elsewhere. It was all the 20th century revolutions from above summed up, reprised, and pushed to conclusions truly terrible for the people of Afghanistan.

What happened in Afghanistan cannot be understood outside of Afghanistan's close relationship with the USSR from the 1950s onwards, and the symbiotic relationship that developed between sections of the Afghan elite and the bureaucratic ruling class in the USSR. The war of colonial conquest into which Russia was drawn in Afghanistan in turn helped bring about the collapse of Stalinism in the USSR.

What follows is an attempt to analyse the "Great Saur Revolution" in its connection with the international experience of Stalinism and the problems posed to Marxist socialists by Stalinism, and an account of what happened afterwards in Afghanistan, from April 1978 to the fall of the Taliban. First we need to examine the pattern of Stalinist revolution from above, of which the Great Saur Revolution was part.

Revolution from above in the 20th century

THE dichotomy, "revolution from above", or revolution from below, stood, for anti-Stalinist revolutionary socialists from the 1940s onwards, at the heart of a cluster of vexed questions about the nature of Stalinism. What was its relationship to the working class? Its place in history? Its relationship to the Marxist conception of the "shape" of history? The appearance of Stalinist states in backward countries, in the first place the USSR, seemingly finding their own unexpected non-capitalist route to modernisation and development, had thrown that conception into disarray.

From above or from below? That way of posing the difference between Marxists and Stalinist anti-capitalists was the pressing into new usage of an old dispute between anarchistic and "statist" socialists. The anarchists emphasised the anti-state element in revolution, the Marxists insisted that the state could not be dispensed with and that a workers' state would play a positive role in the emancipation of the proletariat.

It was also the pressing into use, for understanding the 20th century, of the experience of the 19th century European bourgeoisie. After the abortive 1848 revolutions in Europe, as Frederick Engels would later summarise it: "The period of revolutions from below was concluded for the time being; there followed a period of revolutions from above" (Introduction to The Class Struggles in France, 1895). He had in mind the way that the state under Bismarck in Germany, had pushed through essentially the same bourgeois transformation as was worked by people's revolutions in France and England, but had done it "from above", from within the existing power structures.

For socialists in the mid 20th century, "from above" or "from below" was really too abstract a way of posing the issue. Pro-Stalinists posed it like that, because it left the question begging: what was it that was done "from above"? Was it really the same, in essence, as what a working-class revolution would do "from below"? Those Marxists, the best known of whom was Isaac Deutscher, who insisted that the working class too could make progress by way of (Stalinist) "revolution from above", implied that, just as Bismarck's reforms in Germany had worked a variant of bourgeois social revolution, so also what the Stalinists made was some variant of working-class social revolution.

That was the view reluctantly accepted by the big majority of revolutionary Marxists, or Trotskyists. It was the point of the phrase "revolution from above" used by such as Deutscher. The revolutionaries in the Marxist tradition who now used the old anarchistic emphasis on revolution from below did so as a means of insisting on such ABC principles as that expressed in Karl Marx's dictum that the task of emancipating the proletariat belongs to the working class itself.

"Revolution from below" meant simply what "the socialist revolution" used to mean - the self-liberation of the working class at the head of other working plebeian layers of the population; replacing the rule of a minority bourgeois class by consistent democracy in society and the economy. "The emancipation of the working class is the task of the working class itself."

"Revolution from above" was what the Stalinists did, in different ways but according to one basic pattern. In more or less backward countries - societies far from what Marx or Lenin would have recognised as having outgrown capitalism, and some of them mainly pre-capitalist - closed-in elite formations, varying in their origin and in their degree of mass support, seized the state power or destroyed it and set up their own state power, entrenching themselves as a new exploiting upper class. Working from inside a totalitarian state, they used immense concentrations of force and power to reshape society "from above". The totalitarian state became the owner of everything in society. But who owned the state? As Trotsky put it (The Revolution Betrayed, 1936), while the means of production belonged to the state, "the state, so to speak, 'belongs' to the bureaucracy", organised as a collectivist elite.

The Stalinists said this was working-class rule, but everywhere it was the rule of an exploiting bureaucratic class who subordinated everything to economic development. Their special technique of development was the intense exploitation and super-exploitation of the proletariat and other working people, who stood defenceless before the totalitarian state which deprived them of the right to trade unions, political parties, free assembly and free speech.

By 27 April 1978, when the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan embarked on its own "revolution", using the armed forces as its instrument, "revolution from above" had already taken a rich variety of forms.

In the USSR at the close of 1928, the Stalinist bureaucracy, having effectively suppressed the Bolshevik party and politically expropriated the working class, embarked on Stalin's "Second Revolution". The whole population was driven by a mixture of terror and totalitarian-millenarian propaganda out of the old society, which was deliberately uprooted and overturned by decision of a state grown gigantic in relation to society.

Over 100 million peasants were driven into collective farms. New state industries were created with tremendous speed, human cost and recklessness. Isaac Deutscher, an inveterate apologist for the Stalinist system and incorrigible romancer about what it was and would become, described what had happened vividly in his 1949 biography, Stalin:

"The whole experiment seemed to be a piece of prodigious insanity, in which all rules of logic and principles of economics were turned upside down. It was as if a whole nation had suddenly abandoned and destroyed its houses and huts, which, though obsolete and decaying, existed in reality, and moved, lock, stock and barrel, into some illusory buildings, for which not more than a hint of scaffolding had in reality been prepared; as if that nation had only after this crazy migration set out to make the bricks for the walls of its new dwellings and then found that even the straw for the bricks was lacking; and as if then that whole nation, hungry, dirty, shivering with cold and riddled with disease, had begun a feverish search for the straw, the bricks, the stones, the builders, and the masons, so that, by assembling these, they could at last start building homes incomparably more spacious and healthy than were the hastily abandoned slum dwellings of the past. Imagine that nation numbered 160 million people; and that it was lured, prodded, whipped, and shepherded into that surrealistic enterprise by... a man who established himself in the role of super-judge and super-architect, in the role of a modern super-Pharaoh. Such, roughly, was now the strange scene of Russian life, full of torment and hope, full of pathos and of the grotesque..."

This radical overturning of existing society by an all-powerful state, driving and coaxing the people and then exploiting them mercilessly, is what happened in varying degrees in all the Stalinist revolutions-from above. In Maoist China, to give another example, the "Great Leap Forward" of 1958-61 turned the country upside down, and perhaps thirty million people died in the economic disruption, chaos and famine that followed.

The Stalinist revolutions-from-above outside the USSR came in two basic varieties*:

1. Where an indigenous Stalinist formation took power without dependence on outside help - in Yugoslavia (1943-5), China (the Chinese Stalinists held power in backward parts of China from the 30s; they took control of China in the civil war of 1946-9), Vietnam (1954 and then 1975), Cambodia (1975).

2. By military conquest and annexation to an existing Stalinist state. The USSR thus conquered, and transformed in its own image, 10 countries (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania and East Germany) in Eastern Europe. China extended its control to Tibet, formally in 1950, in substance from 1959 onwards, in a savage still-continuing war. The "agencies" of the revolutions-from-above in Russian-occupied Eastern Europe were Stalinist parties acting as the nucleus around which were grouped splinters of other parties and elements of the old state personnel (including, for example, in Hungary, pre-1945 fascists), fused together under pressure to create replicas of the USSR.

With the exception of Czechoslovakia and perhaps East Germany, all the East European and Balkan Stalinist states were economically and socially underdeveloped. The Communist Parties in the Eastern European states "structurally assimilated" to the USSR after 1944 were typically tiny and unrepresentative. The purging of elements in the Stalinist organisations unsuited to their new role was a feature of the early life of most of the new Stalinist states. The general pattern was that CP leaders who had been in the underground at home - Poland's Gomulka or Hungary's Rajk and Nagy, for example - were purged at Russia's behest as unreliable and nationalistic, to be replaced by those who had spent the war years in Russia and came back beside the Russian Army with, as the saying went, "pipes in their mouths", that is, as Russian puppets, aping Stalin's style and manner.

In this way, from Communist Parties and other parties, from elements of the old state and the old owners and managers, and from elements of the working class and old labour movements, the new ruling class was selected and fused together in a hierarchical, bureaucratic discipline, misleadingly called a party, centred on the state.

Where Stalinist revolutions were made by forces that did not depend on the Russian state, they were made by militarised army-parties based on the peasantry and led mainly by declassed intellectuals and some declassed workers. Thus Yugoslavia, China, Vietnam*.

These "revolutions from above" pitted entrenched militarised states of varying origins against the people and against "organic" social development. The arbitrary bureaucratic craziness - Trotsky, in the early 1930s, called the social theory of the Stalinists "bureaucratic raving" - which Deutscher describes during the forced collectivisation in the USSR had countless smaller manifestations in all the Stalinist states. The degree of consent and of concern with moving and mobilising the people by way of millenarian propaganda varied from case to case and from time to time, but the reserve power of coercion, adroit or crude, select or all-pervasive, was there always. Thus were created societies modelled after that created by Stalin's "Second Revolution" in the USSR - decreed from above, from the heights of authoritarian and totalitarian state power.

That was essential to the project because what characterised all of the societies thus transformed was that they were underdeveloped and backward, sometimes very backward, and unripe for any large collectivisation of industry and agriculture other than that imposed from above as a special form of organisation for totalitarian state exploitation.

In almost all poor countries, in the second half of the 20th century, state enterprise "from above" was a major driving force in industrial and economic development. Development was driven by bureaucratic, military or even aristocratic elite groups, spurred on by foreign example, pressure and competition, rather than by a bourgeoisie which grew up "organically", in the interstices of the old pre-capitalist order. Even early in the century, Trotsky remarked that capitalism emerged in Tsarist Russia as a creation of the state.

That sort of development had many variants: what made it a "reformism from above", in contradistinction to the Stalinist "revolutions from above", was that it was the work of the old ruling circles (or a decisive section of them), rather than of a new force which broke up the old state (or at least its top layers) and installed its own totalitarian power instead. Afghanistan in the 20th century would see both "reformists from above" - notably King Amanullah, in the 1920s, and Mohammed Daud, in the 1950s and the 1970s - and then a unique and extreme, indeed caricatural, form of attempted Stalinist "revolution from above".

A mature socialist society that has grown out of developed capitalism; one where the productive forces have been liberated by a working-class revolution from the limitations imposed on them by private ownership; where labour productivity has been raised higher than capitalism can attain - such a socialist society would be able to guarantee a high standard of living impossible under private industry. The level of productivity attained by working-class democratic collectivism would be such that the breaking up of the integrated, collectivised economic system would mean social decline (an analogy would be to collapse the present levels of labour productivity, created by market capitalism, back into its historical antecedent, feudalism). Stalinist collectivism in underdeveloped economies is the opposite of that. Its primitive collectivism is not the organisation of a level of labour productivity unattainable to privately-organised industry, but a historically specific form of exploitation of the producers.

Socialism, understood as working-class self-rule, comes out of advanced capitalism; its collectivism is the logical and necessary organic culmination of mature capitalism's tendency to socialise production; it is made and sustained by the working class. Stalinist "socialism", by contrast, comes by way of more-or-less arbitrary. revolution from above. The collectivism it imposes is a primitive, bureaucratic collectivism, forced on societies unripe for democratic collectivism (and sometimes unripe even for large-scale capitalism). It has to be set up and sustained by force, not only or primarily against the old ruling class, but against those whose interests it purports to serve. The state power is its strength, not popular support, though it may at times enjoy popular support. Even after great complexes of collectivism have been created, the entrenched state power, standing above society, remains essential to its continuation. Totalitarian state power is the lynch-pin without which the system falls apart.

Afghan society

No society was less "ripe" for revolution - even bureaucratic Stalinist revolution - than Afghanistan in the 1970s. It was one of the most backward pre-capitalist societies on earth. Ahmed Rashid, author of Taliban, quotes this mythic traditional description of Afghanistan.

"When Allah had made the rest of the world, he saw that there was a lot of rubbish left over, bits and pieces and things that did not fit anywhere else. He collected them all together than threw them down on the earth. That was Afghanistan".

Afghanistan's borders are artificial in relation to the population, and they cut through the ethnic groups. The territory of the state was determined by the farthest points reached by its neighbours rather than by the natural limits of anything in Afghanistan itself. British India, the Tsarist Empire, Iran and China, but decisively Russia and British India, formed the matrix inside which was held a conglomerate of ethnic groups, incipient nations. There was no integrated Afghan society, no intermeshing Afghan economy.

There are scores of languages in Afghanistan. Pashtu is the native language of about half the people. The other widely used language is Afghan Persian, Dari. There are perhaps eight million of the Afghan Pashtuns, the biggest ethnic group and the dominant one. They are subdivided into two basic tribal confederations, Ghilzais and Durranis, and those in turn are sub-divided.

Except for a nine-month interlude in 1929, and a four year period between the fall of Najibullah in 1992 and the Taliban capture of Kabul in 1996, Durrani Pashtuns have ruled for over 200 years. Afghan originally meant Pashtun. Other ethnic groups, Tajiks, Uzbeks, etc., tend to refer to themselves by these names and to Pashtuns as Afghans.

Tajiks are the second biggest ethnic group, three to four million strong. Far less tightly enmeshed tribally than Pashtuns, they form a disproportionate part of the town population as traders and administrators. There are about one million Uzbeks, who have tended to be merchants and artisans. Hazaras (descendants of Mongol invaders), Kirghiz, Aimaqs, Turkomans, and Baluchis are the most important of the many other ethnic groups. Some "nationalities" in the Eastern mountains are said to be only a few hundred strong.

Three quarters of the Afghan people have tribal kin across one or other of the borders. There are as many Pashtuns and more Baluchis in Pakistan than in Afghanistan. The USSR had, and its Central Asian successor states have, far larger populations of Turkomans, Tajiks, Kirghiz and Uzbeks than Afghanistan. For a long time the borders of Afghanistan were of no significance to its peoples. Afghanistan's only natural border, separating separate peoples, is its 40km border with China. These people prized the self-respecting independence of the American Indian tribesmen we read about in James Fenimore Cooper and the Scottish clans depicted by Walter Scott. Many of them were habitually armed. Traditionally they regulated their lives by the Islamic code (Shari'a), by tribal custom and by decisions of the community or tribal assembly (Jirga). The latter was absolutely binding: there were no "minority rights". Decisions of Kabul government were filtered through the Shari'a, tribal custom and decisions of the assembly. Where disobedience to Kabul was indicated, they disobeyed.

Common ethnicity, even where it exists, is anyway no more than the raw material of nations. A nation is formed and knit together economically, linguistically and culturally through a historical process. Nothing like that happened in Afghanistan. The state emerged in the 1740s as a loose empire under Ahmed Shah Khan known, after the dominant sub-section of the Pashtuns, as the Durrani Empire. In 1818 the Empire collapsed into a series of principalities: Herat, Kandahar, Kabul, Peshawar, corresponding to ethnic divisions. Unification of sorts was again achieved in the mid 19th century under Dost Mohammed (1826-63), around the Kabul principality.

In the first British-Afghan war (1838-42) the British failed to extend their Indian Empire northwards. In January 1842, 16,500 British troops and their camp followers were forced to leave Kabul; only one man made it to Jalalabad a week later. In the second British-Afghan war (1878-80) Britain also failed to prevail, but succeeded in reducing Afghanistan to the level of a protectorate whose foreign affairs were controlled by Britain. In a third war with Britain, forty years later (1919), the new emir or king, Amanullah Khan, defeated another British invasion and re-established Afghanistan's full independence. In that war fighting erupted in British India too, Pashtuns supporting Pashtuns in Afghanistan.

From that point on, Afghanistan began to come under Russian influence - initially that of the Russia ruled by the Bolsheviks. Afghanistan and Russia gave each other mutual recognition in the dangerous year 1919, and Lenin and Amanullah exchanged ceremonial greetings.

In the 19th and 20th centuries Afghanistan had stood on the fringes of the civilised world. It was "bits and pieces" in terms of ethnic groups, and also "bits and pieces" of different civilisations, different eras of civilisation and different levels of development. Hundreds of years of historical development separated the towns from the countryside.

In early medieval feudal Europe, the towns become oases of the merchant bourgeoisie and of handicrafts, and places of refuge for fleeing serfs - the first shoots of a new bourgeois world that would take centuries to grow to dominance over the antagonistic countryside. As wide a gap and a similar antagonism existed between the towns of Afghanistan and the countryside. And almost as large a span of time and development separated the towns from their equivalent in more advanced countries.

In terms of its levels of development, Afghanistan was on the very edge of the modern and modernising world - and yet it was inexorably pulled into that world's orbit. It faced unsuccessful intrusion and attempted conquest by the armies of the most advanced society on earth in the 1840s, partially successful invasion in the 1880s, defeated invasion and the winning of full independence in 1919. Inevitably over time it was impressed on those who ran the state and on a section of the urban elite that they had to learn from the outside world and acquire as much as possible of its military technology.

Ideas of modernisation and of economic development found roots - shallow roots - in the urban crevices of Afghanistan. To keep up with the rest of humanity, Afghanistan needed to develop its forces of production beyond nomad herding (which was how about two million of its people still lived in 1980), big landlordism and debt-ridden peasants, tribal sub-division, merchant capitalism in the towns, and handicraft production.

In terms of its own social forces and processes, Afghanistan was very far from such development. State initiatives and outside resources therefore came to seem to successive layers of the elite and of those who controlled the state to be the only way Afghanistan could develop. The condition of Afghan society placed the onus of reform on the state. Reform and revolution from above are the central themes of Afghan history in the 20th century. Elite groups looked for outside patterns and models. Repeatedly they failed in their initiatives. Naturally the reforming emirs saw the strengthening and modernisation of the state itself, that is of their own power vis-a-vis society, as the key to everything else. Standing against them were the structures of an archaic tribal-feudal society where power lay in the ethnic groups, the nobility, and the priests.

The economy developed, but very slowly and very unevenly. The territory came nowhere near to the prerequisite of a capitalist state - being knitted together economically. Weak modernisers met with defeat. The pattern was repeated, again and again, feeble or strong but unmistakably the same, from the emir Abdul Rahman Khan, who tried to modernise under the stimulus of Afghanistan's partial defeat in the second Afghan-British war, right through to the blundering Stalinists after the Saur (April) Revolution of 1978.

Abdul Rahman, who ruled from 1880 to 1901, created a standing army, with British subsidies, and attempt to raise the central state above society. He fought internal wars of conquest on which the claims of Kabul in the 20th century to rule Afghanistan were erected. He set up colonies of rebellious Pashtuns among hostile peoples in the North and massacred non-Pashtuns.

Over the decades, the state was strengthened - the state of the 1970s was not the state of the 1880s - but the Afghan state never attained the sort of power vis-a-vis society that the different types of European state have had for centuries.

King Amanullah (1919-29)

Amanullah, the king who exchanged greetings with Lenin in 1919, continued Abdul Rahman's work. He had had links during his father's reign with a modernising movement called "Young Afghanistan". He enacted serious reforms in the early 1920s.

He abolished slavery and the slave trade; tried to create a modern secular legal system to replace Islamic Shari'a law and the multiplicity of tribal and clerical jurisdictions; proclaimed equality before the law; encouraged the opening of an academy for girls in Kabul. However, his writ did not run far. Amanullah was a feudal king, an enlightened despot, presiding over a weak central state, with little power to reshape society when he did not have the consent of those who ruled in all the layers of Afghan society and of the Jirgas (councils), feudal assemblies of Khans, priests and "estates" at different levels up to the Loya Jirga (grand council).

Already in the 1920s, links with the USSR were important. Russia would become Afghanistan's main trading partner; and the USSR already did such things for Afghanistan as set up a telegraph line, cotton processing plant and an electric power station. In the mid 1920s the Soviet Union already provided not only teachers but pilots for the modernising king in putting down tribal revolts.

King Amanullah paid a two-week visit to the USSR in 1928, part of an eight-month tour outside Afghanistan, on the eve of Stalin's second revolution. He also visited Iran and Turkey. Inspired by what he saw of the achievements of the Ataturk regime which had reconstructed and begun to modernise Turkey, when he returned to Afghanistan he embarked on a vigorous new drive for reform and modernisation.

What happened then prefigured what would happen fifty years later, after the Stalinist Saur revolution. The revolutionising, enlightened monarch Amanullah attempted to strengthen the central state by putting the feudal-tribal leaders and the priests under government control. It was what was done in England under Henry VII in the late fifteenth century and early sixteenth century, and in France under Louis XIV in the late seventeenth century. He proposed to create a modern army, a conscript army to which no-one would be allowed to send substitutes. The king's dilemma was that in order to proceed he needed first to make the state strong enough to overcome resistance to change. Fatally, he tried to proceed without first having adequately built up a central state capable of imposing the king's will against the tribal leaders and the priests.

In October 1928, Amanullah proposed the setting-up of joint schools for boys and girls. Women were freed from purdah (limits on when they could leave their homes, and the obligation to be heavily covered up when they did). A minimum age was decreed for marriage - that is, for when girls could be taken as sexual partners. Amanullah tried to create a political instrument to carry out this revolution. He set up a revolutionary party, called "Independence and Revolution".

Amanullah reflected the interests and desires of some merchants and intellectuals, but he and they had too narrow a base of support to carry through even this revolution. Perhaps most importantly, Amanullah, like the PDPA fifty years later, had no support among the farmers. Unlike the PDPA, Amanullah offered them nothing. The poor peasants had endured a 45% rise in land tax in 1924 and had nothing to gain from Amanullah's "bourgeois" reforms.

This was an attempt at a bourgeois reform-from-above where the bourgeoisie was feeble and divorced from the countryside. The Afghan merchant bourgeoisie, with their "enlightened despot", the weak king ruling a weak feudal state, were still far weaker than their English or French equivalents had been in the Middle Ages.

A broad anti-Amanullah coalition was formed. At its core were the religious leaders. They rallied the tribal khans, and behind them the entire rural population, including the peasants. By November 1928, after Pashtun tribes in the eastern provinces had raised the standard of revolt, rebellion was spreading quickly throughout the country. Amanullah simply had no forces with which to attempt to defeat it. In January 1929 he abdicated in favour of his brother Inayatullah Khan.

The country was in uproar. On 15 January Tajik rebel forces took Kabul. Their low-born, illiterate peasant-bandit leader Habibullah, nicknamed Bacha-I-Saquo ("son of a watercarrier"), was proclaimed Emir of Afghanistan, as Habibullah Khan.

For the first time in nearly 200 years, Pashtuns did not rule. But this was no plebeian revolution. Habibullah was a reactionary and traditionalist, albeit a usurping, part of the feudal counter-revolution. Amanullah's reforms were annulled - the department of justice was closed down, law remained exclusively a matter for the religious courts, and the schools were closed. The possibility of economic modernisation through the state was greatly weakened*.

Anti-Pashtun revolution and social counter-revolution had briefly been fused, but Habibullah did not last out the year. With the help of the British rulers in India, Mohammed Nadir Khan organised an expeditionary force of 12,000 men - Pashtuns - and united the tribes against the usurper. They took Kabul on 15 October 1929. The presumptuous non-Pashtun Emir surrendered and was shot. Nadir Khan became Emir. He would be assassinated in 1933. His son, Mohammed Zahir Shah - the old man now in Rome - would be king until his first cousin and brother-in-law, Mohammed Daud, organised a coup and declared a Republic 40 years later, in 1973.

In the story of Amanullah the basic pattern of modern Afghanistan is there in full: outside prodding by example, stimulation, aggression and painful contrast leads the elite or segments of it to attempt to modernise and develop Afghanistan. The central state is too weak to override the conservative forces and the forces of reaction. Those pushing for change are socially weak and are unable to resist, still less defeat, the powerful forces of reaction which they stir up.

At the core of the situation is the weakness of the bourgeoisie and of the tiny working class. The bourgeoisie was a weak merchant class. Under Amanullah in the mid 1920s, merchants increased their influence and power in society at the expense of the landlords, but they remained weak. So did the central state which sought to aid them and which, by modernising, would have strengthened them. The merchants traded mainly with the USSR. The working class was still rudimentary. A few factories, and many small workshops, produced a numerically and socially weak working class. There were no big enterprises, such as there had been in Tsarist Russia, which would concentrate proletarians and give them the social and political weight to affect what happened. When, by the 1960s, workers engaged in strikes, they were politically hegemonised by the Stalinists.

Modernisation or revolution from above was impossible; movements from below were movements of religious and social reaction, even regression. They followed traditional leaders and traditional ideas, and were locked for the most part into traditional social structures. Amanullah was an Ataturk that failed: so, in the 1950s and 1970s, would be the initially more successful Mohammed Daud, the most important of all the reforming royals; so too would be those who made - or rather failed to make - the Saur revolution after April 1978.

Aspirations to modernisation after Amanullah (1929-53)

After the fall of Amanullah, trade relations with Russia remained close and grew. Russia imported Afghan luxury agricultural goods and provided "modern world" things for Afghanistan - helping, for example, to create a cotton processing industry. Agitation for modernisation, and essentially for Amanullah's programme, would go on among tiny segments of the Afghan elite, but it had no way forward. Either the state would pioneer a transformation, or no forces in Afghanistan could. After Amanullah, for a generation, no-one at the centre tried to.

Supporters of Young Afghanistan organised terrorism in the early 30s. One of them killed the king in 1933. The terrorism reflected the weakness of what they represented - essentially, what Amanullah had represented, and what future reformers would represent. They wanted to replace the Islamic code as the basis of the state by secular law. They were Pashtun nationalists, demanding Pashtun-occupied territory from then British-occupied India. Later, after 1947, their co-thinkers would demand it from Pakistan, with momentous consequences.

Attempts by Afghanistan in 1919 and again after 1945, as Britain prepared to leave India, to renegotiate the Durand Line border, which arbitrarily cut the Pashtun people in two, would meet with dismissal. Pashtun nationalism would, by pushing Afghanistan into the Soviet orbit, shape Afghanistan's history in the second half of the 20th century. Young Afghanistan had links with the USSR. But after 1933 they ceased to be a force.

In the 1930s, Afghanistan took some German credit and German goods; and in 1937, Afghanistan joined Turkey, Iran and Iraq in the Saadob Pact, to resist Russian expansion. But in the 1939-45 war Afghanistan remained neutral, and on the USSR-British side. In 1941 it expelled German and Italian diplomats.

A national bank which regulated trade had been founded in the 1930s, but Afghanistan remained underdeveloped and stagnant. Another modernising movement, in its ideas the heir of its predecessors such as Young Afghanistan, came into existence in reaction to Afghanistan's stagnation in the years after the Second World War. This movement was called Awakened Youth ["Wikh-e-Zalmayan"]. It too was made up of educated middle and small bourgeois, members of the intelligentsia and offspring of the elite, even of the large royal clan. These were the sort of people who made up the early Russian revolutionary movements of the 19th century, the Decembrists of the 1820s, and the populists of the 1870s and after, who "went to the people". And, like their Russian analogues, they would prove incapable of transforming the social situation they were trapped in.

The programme of this movement was broadly the same as those of its predecessors: modernisation, developing the economy, and strengthening the state, which also meant strengthening the towns - islands of half-modern life in a prehistoric sea - against the countryside. It was Amanullah's programme, or a variant of it. Some of the people in Awakened Youth would turn into Stalinists. Out of Awakened Youth or from its periphery came "Democratic Reform", which had a radical left wing led by Noor Mohammed Taraki, who would organise the Saur Revolution of 1978 and become President of Afghanistan. They talked of "democratisation" and of rising living standards; they won a number of deputies to the "People's Council".

Another such movement (1950) was Watan ("Homeland"). It had a broader political and economic programme: democratisation of political institutions; removal of political restrictions; a free press; free parliamentary elections; the right to form political parties; and economic development, which meant state economic activity.

One faction of Watan, calling itself Voice of the People ["Nida-I Khalq"] organised a political party in Summer 1951; it was quickly declared illegal. The insuperable problem of all these movements, with their similar programmes (though these post-war movements, lacking proposals for equal treatment for women, lagged a little behind Amanullah) was that the class that might elsewhere have pursued and fought for their ideas was very weak. Their weakness was illustrated by the cardinal fact about Nida-I Khalq: it had a cadre of ten men, just ten, and was mainly active amongst medical and law students at Kabul University.

The oppositionist "movements" of disgruntled elite youth naturally enmeshed and overlapped with the ruling elite. As Amanullah had been involved in Young Afghanistan, so now Sardar Mohammed Daud, the king's first cousin and later brother-in-law, was in and of the elite modernising movements of the 1940s. When he became prime minister in 1953 - he had already been a minister for some years - Daud, the most important elite reformer/revolutionist-from-above in 20th century Afghanistan, would play a decisive role in developing Afghanistan and putting it into qualitatively closer relations with the USSR.

When, in the elections to the 8th National Assembly, in April 1952, none of the oppositionists managed to gain election as a deputy, the protests by students at Kabul University against election-rigging were led by Babrak Karmal. The son of a general, he was the future head of the government that the Russians would install in 1980.

The government began to crack down on the opposition, doing so with the customary Afghan mix of benign and savage repression. The youth organisations were banned, some leaders were arrested and jailed, others were exiled on government service. Noor Mohammed Taraki, who would become Afghanistan's head of state after the "Saur Revolution", was exiled to Washington as press attachŽ at the Afghan Embassy there. But progress did not depend on victory for the opposition - something unthinkable - nor did their being banned and persecuted rule it out.

Into the USSR's orbit (after 1953)

In 1953, when Mohammed Daud became Prime Minister, he vigorously took up the old cause of modernisation and development. He proclaimed "guided elections", instituted a five-year economic development plan and took Afghanistan closer into the orbit of the USSR. It is important to understand how and why this happened. Without it the 1978 Stalinist coup would not have been possible.

Pashtun nationalism was central to the upper-class modernising "opposition" movement that emerged after the Second World War. They demanded that the Pashtun districts of Afghanistan and of Pakistan be unified as part of the Afghan state. They insisted that the Durand Line dividing Afghanistan and British India (since 1947, Pakistan) was arbitrary and wrong, artificially dividing the Pashtuns. In the mid-1940s, as Britain prepared to leave India, and before India and Pakistan divided, the Afghan Pashtun elite tried unsuccessfully to negotiate with Britain for their "Pashtunistan". By 1950 Afghan-loyal guerrillas were active in the Pashtun areas against the Pakistan state; and by the early 50s, there was considerable tension between Afghanistan and Pakistan over the question.

The USA needed Pakistan as an ally in the region against both Russia and China, where the Stalinists had consolidated their control in 1949. When Daud tried to get US arms in 1953, the USA said no and told Daud to settle Afghanistan's quarrel with Pakistan. Essentially, the USA took sides with Pakistan. In the bipolar world of the Cold War, that left the USSR as ally and model for Afghanistan.

Russia was coming out of the inflexible foreign policy of the first years of the Cold War. It was seeking influence in Third World countries. The USA and Russia would soon compete in offering aid in a bid for clients and friends. Later in the decade, Egypt, refused western aid to build the Aswan High Dam, would turn to the USSR and for over a decade move into the USSR's orbit. The USSR established friendly links with other "progressive" rulers such as Sukarno in Indonesia and, after 1958, Kassem in Iraq.

So, after 1953, insulted, Afghanistan turned for aid to the USSR, already a very important trading partner. One account of it is that Mohammed Daud, knowing that the USA would favour Pakistan, wanted to be insulted by the USA so that he could whip up support for the turn to the USSR he wanted to make anyway, and wrongfoot conservative opponents of such a turn. Daud was engaged in a new drive to modernise Afghanistan and in an attempt to strengthen the state and the army, on which everything would depend. Like other Third World rulers, he was willing to learn from the USSR experience of using state power to organise economic development.

In 1955 the USSR granted Afghanistan a long-term loan of $100 million. Afghanistan already got most of its manufactured goods from the USSR - for example, 50% of imported machinery, and 85% of petroleum goods. Now the USSR would undertake to equip the Afghan armed forces with planes and tanks and artillery, and train Afghans to run and maintain those modern machines of war. It would organise Afghan telecommunications and air communications; build trunk roads and bridges; install hydro-electric power; and construct elite housing enclaves in Kabul. In all these things, but most significantly, in connection with operating and maintaining modern ground and air war machinery, Russian advisers and technicians came to Afghanistan to train Afghans. Steadily growing numbers of Afghan officers went to the USSR for education. The USSR thereby gained a shaping influence on the key layers of the officer corps of the air force and the army and tank regiments which it now undertook to equip and train.

To the feeble merchant bourgeoisie was added a more modern-minded element, and a more dynamic one - yet one rooted not in the development of Afghan industry and technology, but in the importation into one of the most backward societies on earth of advanced military technology.

If the cities were islands in a prehistoric sea, a thousand years ahead of the countryside, the armed forces, flying and maintaining modern planes and running tanks and modern artillery, were the representatives and embodiment of a technology 100 years ahead of the average level of the towns. Tsarist Russia had imported capital and Western industrial technology, and created giant concentrations of workers who shaped the future of Russian society; but the workers, though a small minority of Russia's population, were themselves numerous, and had contact with the peasantry from which they had emerged. Afghanistan imported military technology and gained a comparatively narrow layer of educated military technicians. They too would shape the future of their society, though in a very different direction. The officer corps was numerically small, and it tended to be detribalised, and thus to have even less contact with the people than the bourgeoisie and the royal modernisers had. Its relationship with the numerically large rank and file of the armed forces was one of a hierarchy of command, not of political leadership.

By the end of the 1950s, Russia, which in November 1957 had put the first man-made craft into orbit around the Earth, had great economic prestige. For the educated layers of a country like Afghanistan, even those who would not become "Communists", Russia's statised economy offered, in whole or in part, a model of quick development and modernisation. The lure of the Russian model was powerful. And so Daud initiated the closer links with Russia that led ultimately to the Saur Revolution. He was concerned to strengthen the Afghan state against internal and external opponents: of course, he hoped to keep control, but he found that at the end he did not control the state. People working closely with the Russian state were able to use parts of "Daud's" state to make a strange coup-revolution.

Stalinism in Afghanistan (from the 1950s)

Stalinism in Afghanistan cannot be understood outside of Afghanistan's interaction with the USSR. But it also cannot be understood except as the heir of all the movements - from "below", or at least from not quite the top layers, by the youth of the elite, and from above, by those who controlled the state itself - for modernisation and development. In its aspirations, it was a mutant variant of what the non-Stalinist reformers sought, taking the USSR as model of what was "modern" and "developed"; in its origins, driving forces, and brutal bulldozing methods once in power, it was a direct outcome of their repeated failures. In Afghanistan, movements for reform "from below" - in the sense that they sought to build a political opposition - tended to come from among the upper reaches of society, amongst the young and sections of the intelligentsia. The reformers-from-below had virtually one recurring programme, and that was identical with the programme of the reformers-from-above - development, and one degree or other of "democratisation". Young elite reform movements from "below" tended to divide into those whose origins, family and connections already overlapped with the establishment and the personnel of the state, and who evolved into reformists-from-above, the only possible sort of practising reformer - from Amanullah to Daud - and those who remained outside and really "below". Many of those became Stalinists.

There were Stalinists and Stalinist sympathisers in Afghanistan in the 1930s and 1940s. In the 1950s, one immediate consequence of the agreements with Russia was a loosening of repression against pro-Russian Stalinists. That was when the nuclei of the future Stalinist parties took shape in the form of "discussion groups", though a Stalinist party, the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, was not founded until 1 January 1965. Within two years of the founding of the PDPA, the organisation would split into two groups, both claiming to be the PDPA and distinguished by the names of newspapers their organisations briefly published in the 1960s, Parcham (Flag) and Khalq (People, Masses). After a decade at war with each other - during some of which, after 1973, Parcham was part of Mohammed Daud's republican government which persecuted Khalq - they united again in 1977 to prepare for the April 1978 coup. Within weeks of the coup they had split again, bloodily.

Probably the distinction between Parcham and Khalq existed in the "discussion" groups of the 1950s. In any case the PDPA was never more than two brief and unstable conjunctions between two distinct parties.

Because of Russia's direct influence on layers of the Afghan elite, both PDPAs, Khalq and Parcham, were unique among Stalinist organisations. These were not to any degree working-class or peasant organisations. They were both rooted in sections of the Afghan state elite and bits of the bourgeoisie and intelligentsia. They were organisations of segments of the urban elite, of the ruling class - segments distinguished from the rest of their class by belief in a "Russian" way forward for Afghanistan and commitment not to a bourgeois model of Afghanistan's development but to a bureaucratic Stalinist model. They aspired to switch Afghan history on to the Stalinist track of development; already part of the Afghan ruling class, they wanted to transform themselves into a bureaucratic elite after the model of what existed in Russia. They had many things in common with, for example, the bureaucratic elites selected as their satraps by the Russians when they transformed the East European societies into replicas of the USSR, but they were selected in a unique way because of the close relationship that had developed between the USSR's ruling class and the rulers of Afghanistan. They never developed anything remotely like a mass following. They could make the Saur Revolution only by winning over the key segments of the military elite.

In the passage quoted at the head of this article, Leon Trotsky truly wrote of the leadership of the Stalinist parties that:

"The predominating type among the present 'communist' bureaucrats is the political careerist... Their ideal is to attain in their own countries the same position that the Kremlin oligarchy gained in the USSR. They are not the revolutionary leaders of the proletariat but aspirants to totalitarian rule. They dream of gaining success with the aid of this same Soviet bureaucracy and its GPU..."

The degree to which that "type" would "predominate" would vary from party to party, and within the parties from layer to layer of the party leadership. There never was a Stalinist party - and not only the leadership of the party, but the whole organisation - that corresponded more closely to what Trotsky wrote in 1940 than did the Stalinists of Afghanistan.

The leading figures of Afghan Stalinism had a considerable political history by the mid-1950s. Noor Mohammed Taraki, future leader of Khalq and President of the People's Democratic Republic of Afghanistan proclaimed after the Saur coup, was a Ghilzai Pashtun, born about 1917 into a semi-nomadic family of livestock dealers. The Ghilzai were hostile to the ruling Durrani Pashtuns. Taraki worked in India in 1935-7. Possibly he was even then sympathetic to the Communist Party of India, and he may have joined it.

What "communism" meant even in comparatively underdeveloped India, where there was a proletariat and a bourgeoisie, bore some relationship to what it meant in Europe. But what did "communism" mean in tribal-feudal Afghanistan, where both proletariat and bourgeoisie were feeble segments of urban islands in one of the most backward countries on earth? Did it mean that "communists" would support bourgeois progress? Aspire to make a working-class revolution?

In fact, by now the Stalinists everywhere in backward countries - and not only in backward countries - stood for bourgeois-democratic revolution. In China already, and soon in Yugoslavia, Albania, and other countries, armed Stalinists would aspire to power, using "bourgeois-democratic revolution" as a flag of convenience. But for Afghanistan even the aspiration to a bourgeois-democratic revolution seemed insanely ambitious.

Taraki studied law and political science at the Kabul college for government employees, from which he graduated in 1941. Employed by the Ministry of Economic Development, he was a protŽgŽ of Abdul Majid Zabuli, Afghanistan's leading merchant and founder in 1934 of Afghanistan's first investment bank. He worked for Zabuli as a private secretary around 1937. Zabuli dealt much with the USSR and naturally had connections with Stalinist state officials. Even at the top of Afghanistan's merchant capitalist class there was already a considerable interpenetration with the USSR, Afghanistan's major trading partner.

Taraki fell out with Zabuli. He was, it seems, accused, but not charged, with stealing Zabuli's property. No longer Zabuli's protŽgŽ, he was fired from the Economic Development Ministry. He then worked his way up the bureaucratic ladder of the government Press Department, becoming Deputy Chief of the official Afghan News Agency in the 1940s. In 1951 he became involved with Awakening Youth and worked on its paper, Angar (Burning Ember), which was banned after four issues. The paper advocated the right to form legal political parties, free elections and a democratic constitution.

By now Taraki had some reputation as a poet and story writer. In the repression that, after the recurrent Afghan pattern, soon followed the period of "liberalisation", Taraki suffered only banishment - to Washington, as press and cultural attachŽ. When prime minister Daud recalled him in 1953, he asked for political asylum in the USA. This was refused. He called a press conference to denounce Daud. Then he disappeared for three years; he may have been in the USSR. Back in Kabul he worked as a translator. By 1962 Taraki was working as a translator for the US Embassy! He was a full-time organiser for the incipient PDPA by 1963.

Taraki was the leading writer and theorist of Khalq, and also a representative figure of the social composition of its leading layer. A first-generation-literate intellectual from a poor background, who had had to struggle for an education, he never lost the attitudes of rural Afghanistan to women, and had the "outsider" attitudes of a Ghilzai Pashtun towards the Durrani Pashtun elite and the Durrani Mohammedzai royal clan who held, dispensed, and manipulated power. Taraki lived as an intellectual in a too-slowly moving society - a writer in one of the two dominant languages, in a society with only five per cent of town dwellers and two per cent of rural Afghans literate - connected, of necessity and for his living, with the civil service and the commercial bourgeoisie.

Babrak Karmal became the central leader of Parcham when his predecessor, Mir Akhbar Kyber, was assassinated - possibly by Khalq - on the eve of the April coup of 1978. His background and political history is as emblematic of Parcham as Taraki's was of Khalq.

He was born in January 1929, the son of an army officer, who retired with the rank of General in 1965. He was a Dari-speaking Pashtun from an urban pro-Mohammedzai royal family. He was suspected of being of Tajik origin, "passing" for Pashtun. The family was wealthy, and Karmal had the best education possible in Afghanistan. He helped form a student union at Kabul University in 1950, which was banned after a few months. He was jailed for three years in 1953, but he spent his time not where he would probably have died, in the killer medieval common jail, but, as befitted one of his class, in a well-furnished private room.

After two years as a conscript in the army, he returned to the university and completed his degree in 1960. Like Taraki, he studied law and political science. Karmal was an orator, not a writer. He too worked as a translator - from German, for the Minister of Education. He also worked for the Ministry of Economic Planning (Afghanistan had its own five year plans). He became a full-time political organiser in 1964, on the eve of the proclamation of the PDPA. Karmal lived in the large USSR-built housing enclave (Mikrorayon) near Kabul, which housed state bureaucrats and army officers.

From the mid-1950s, when the proto-PDPA came into existence, as discussion groups in Kabul, people like Taraki and Karmal had connections with students and armed-forces officers. But these "communist" discussion groups were not opponents of the Daud Government, which had turned its face decisively towards "friendship and cooperation" with the USSR. Communist Parties in countries friendly with the USSR were everywhere working with the "progressive" local rulers - with Sukarno in Indonesia, Kassem in Iraq (1958-63), and Nasser in Egypt. That phase of Russian policy for Third World states would shape Afghan Stalinism before 1965, when the declaration of the PDPA signalled a change of tack. Though he acted in the name of the King, Daud had effectively been dictator. In terms of achievement, he is the most important of all Afghan reformers. Daud got rid of the compulsory veil for women. It was a milestone in Afghan social history when Daud, one day in 1956, appeared in public alongside the women of his family demonstratively unveiled. He built up the conscript army - that is the independent power of the state, raised autonomously above society, and potentially a force by way of which the towns could hope to subdue the countryside. He built up the economy using state resources, state planning and foreign help. He drew systematically closer to the USSR, thereby, to be sure, seeking to pursue his own goals.

For those in the proto-PDPA, Daud was doing pretty much what they wanted done - though not enough of it, and not fast enough. He was perhaps more satisfactory from the future Parcham's point of view than the future Khalq's. Daud was surely to Russia's satisfaction, and Daud's overthrow in 1963 was, for the Russians, decidedly unsatisfactory.

Daud was dismissed in 1963 by the King, who now took over the actual power for the first time. Though thirty years on the throne, Zahir had never ruled. His uncles, a repressive and then a more liberal one, and then his first cousin Daud, had ruled in his name. But Zahir too was now a reformer. In October 1964 he produced a new "democratic constitution". There would be an elected parliament, under universal suffrage. Women could vote and be candidates. The right to organise legal political parties was promised. Members of the royal family other than the king were legally banned from holding political office. Thus was achieved one of the goals of the old reform movements from below, the breaking of the Mohammedzai extended royal family's monopoly of power.

Elections were held in 1965. Four women were elected to parliament. However, only a tiny fraction of those eligible to vote, voted. The people were still enmeshed in the pre-state structures and limited "democracy" of the ethnic groups and their councils. The voting figures were a measure of the relationship of the towns to the countryside and of the central state to the Afghan people: the central government did not loom large in their concerns, and it had little impact on their lives. In fact, Zahir's new constitution was still only a half-and-half system; the king, not parliament, would in fact rule.

The dismissal of Daud in 1963 was seen as a blow to Russian interests in Afghanistan; one consequence of that was the drive to form the PDPA from the "discussion groups". Yet nothing fundamentally changed in Afghan-USSR relations. Major changes would come only after Daud's return in the mid-1970s. The response then, by the organisation created in response to Daud's fall in 1963, would be the Saur coup that buried Daud. With the formation of the PDPA the old question of creating a strong state able to lever or dictate to society became fused with the Stalinist drive to create a totalitarian state. The "Great Saur Revolution" of April 1978 marked its seeming triumph. Its manifest failure then led to the Russian invasion, after which the drive to create a state strong enough to reshape Afghanistan against the will of its people then fused with Russia's attempt to replace the Afghan state by a state of the invaders and their collaborators. "Modernisation" moved from an Afghan attempt at strengthening the state to an attempt to replace it by foreign totalitarian rule, driving to revolutionise Afghan society not only from "above" but from outside. The outcome would be the utter destruction of the Afghan state, and the collapse of Afghanistan into warlord fiefdoms. But that is to anticipate.

The formation and splintering of the PDPA (1965-7)

The PDPA was founded at a conference of 27 men, held on New Year's Day 1965 at the home of Noor Mohammed Taraki in a upper-class district of Kabul. None of those present were military men. Taraki was elected General Secretary, with Babrak Karmal as his deputy. The programme they adopted was one of national reform and development, a programme that was identifiably in continuity with traditional Afghan drives for reform and modernisation.

The congress called for "democratic change", for "democratic government serving the people", and for a non-capitalist way of development. The party's brief-lived publication Khalq put it like this: the PDPA "aimed to unite the people in their struggle against despotism and reaction, to show the working people the way to a free and democratic society." (April 1966)

"Democratic" was the "brand name" for what was done by Stalinist rulers who held that they themselves embodied "the people" and could substitute for them: when they ruled, the people ruled. "Non-capitalist" meant more than one thing here. It meant taking the USSR as a model of "socialism" and of a "free and democratic society". It also meant state enterprise such as Daud had organised, but more of it. Different parts of the PDPA would perhaps understand the term "non-capitalist" with, at least, different emphases. Some of them differed from Daud in degree not kind, or, anyway, saw what Daud had done as a weaker variant of their own statist policy. That there was an overlapping and blurring of lines between Daud's programme and one section of the PDPA (Parcham) would, as we shall see, be important for the future.

Afghanistan was then experiencing something of a public debate on models of "national development". It was a time of almost universal faith in the state as the only possible force for modernisation and development in the Third World. The PDPA's programme was one - extreme - variant among others of a statist model of development for Afghanistan. There was no difference between the PDPA and non-Stalinist Afghan devotees of statism on the necessity for a privileged elite in the future. The only argument was about its character. The leaders of the PDPA saw themselves as an elite like that of the USSR, the rest had a more bourgeois - or maybe "Egyptian", that is, bourgeois-bureaucratic hybrid - notion of the elite.

It should be noted that the PDPA was not explicitly secular and it was not avowedly Marxist. It talked of a "National Democratic Front" to work for "progressive reform". The sprawling extended royal family of Mohammedzai, despite the limitations imposed on its members in politics by the reforming king Zahir, still monopolised lucrative posts, blocking advancement for those outside the big and ever-increasing ruling clan. Here the upper class, bureaucrats and bourgeoisie, still had reason for discontent: it fed into the PDPA as it had fed into the earlier reform movements of which the PDPA was a mutant, Stalinising, continuation and descendant.

Though the Khalq/Parcham identities did not emerge until 1967, the distinction probably existed in a more or less defined form from the beginning. The National Committee elected at the founding congress had more or less parity of future Parcham and Khalq, and it would be strange if this was an anticipatory accident and not a deliberate attempt to accommodate known distinctions. The open Parcham/Khalq distinction within the PDPA emerged around the question of how "oppositional" the PDPA should be. The Parchamis accused the Khalq of ultra-leftism.

It came about in this way. When in late 1965, a new press law legalised opposition papers, it was only one more round in an already familiar cycle of liberalisation followed by repression. As in 1951, repression would come close on the heels of licence. State control of the press was not in fact lifted. Harrying censorship continued. When the PDPA published the newspaper Khalq (People, Masses), it was suppressed after only six issues (May 1966). It was thereafter succeeded by occasional illegal publications. The response of the future Parchamis to the ban broke the PDPA in two.

Inside the PDPA, Babrak Karmal criticised Khalq for having been too openly "communist". The future Parchamis advocated more caution, more circumspection, more skilful camouflage. Daud and his faction were now in opposition too, and Karmal saw the PDPA as simultaneously competing with the Daudites for the more "advanced" layers of the reform wing of the establishment and collaborating with them. Caution, moderation, close links with the Daudites, that was how the PDPA should work: it was the old policy, applied now with Daud out of office. "Leftism" was the main danger here. "Leftism" had lost the party its newspaper. It was only a year after the military-Islamist backlash that followed a botched Stalinist half-coup had killed hundreds of thousands of Communist Party members in Indonesia. Caution was in order.

A small majority of the PDPA Central Committee rejected Karmal's criticism. Taraki then tried to secure his majority by co-opting some of his supporters to the Central Committee. In spring 1967 the PDPA became two bitterly hostile PDPAs. The split would last ten years.

Though the Central Committee divided almost 50-50, the majority in the PDPA were probably Parchamis. Neither of the two PDPAs was repudiated by the USSR. Each group made bitter public denunciations of the other and, what must have caused confusion and embitterment, both claimed to be the PDPA. The differences expressed in the dispute around the banned newspaper Khalq reflected radical social and political differences and a difference in orientation - between working with the Daudite section of the establishment or working on it from outside; between a reformist orientation, in essence a continuation of the old reform movements, despite the Stalinist dimension of Parcham, and a revolutionary, or more revolutionary, approach to getting done what they all agreed needed to be done. It is not at all likely that even the Khalqis at this point thought it even a remote possibility to go for the full Russian model that they would go for in April 1978.

The Parchamis were more cautious not only because they were more "establishment" in background and connections, more "traditional" in orientation, overlapping heavily with the Daud opposition forces, but also, it seems, because they were closer to Russia. In accordance with its conception of its "tasks", Parcham was more loosely structured than Khalq. Khalq were more "outsider" in composition and attitude.

Before they became groups whose most important segment was airforce and army officers, both PDPAs, Khalq and Parcham, were a movement of the Afghan intelligentsia, of students and teachers in a country where the literate were only five per cent of the urban and two per cent of the rural population. Within that layer, Khalq tended to attract the unemployed and less well-connected, though even here there was no absolute distinction: Parcham had a militant phase in the late 1960s. In 1978 Taraki said a majority of the members of the PDPA were teachers. In this lay the continuity with the earlier reform movements and the importance of the perennial activity among students - privileged student scions of the elite. In the 1960s and 1970s these were the main forces taking part in the PDPA-organised demonstrations.

After teachers, journalists on the official press and radio were the second most important group for the PDPA.

Increased state economic and other activity would create jobs for the educated unemployed or underemployed with no other prospects: such people would therefore have a natural bias towards a statist, or even the full USSR, model of economic development, even when they themselves were not directly trained or educated in Russia or by Russians. That is shown most clearly in the career of the PDPA-Khalq leader Hafizullah Amin - the organiser of the April 1978 coup, Prime Minister from June 1978, and President after September 1979. Amin was an educationalist by profession, principal of schools and colleges. Like a number of other leading PDPAers (for example Taraki and Dr Anahita Ratebzad) he spent time in the USA, where he worked for a doctorate. Before he focused in the 1970s on organising military officers for the PDPA, Amin organised in Pashtun boarding schools and among teachers.

Let us finally try to sum up what distinguished the two Stalinist parties from each other. It was by no means clear-cut and stark on all points, but in general the two parties differed in the layers, upper or lower, of the old elite in which they originated, and in their connections with specific segments of the existing establishment.

The leading Parchamis were people whose origins tied them to the upper layers of the state bureaucracy, the bourgeoisie, the intelligentsia, and the armed forces. They were urban in origin and, like the state bureaucracy, included non-Pashtuns. They intermeshed with the layers engaged in "reform from above" to such an extent that they became part of the government set up after Mohammed Daud's republican coup in 1973. Conversely, in the Saur coup of 1978, they could pull some of those same upper-crust reform forces, disappointed with Daud, into the experiment of a different, Stalinist, attempt at reform from above.

Parcham was of the two parties the closer to the Russians; it was very much a Russian puppet. Parcham was the hybrid linking the "progressive" Afghan elite and the Russian bureaucracy. It was essentially a group of insiders, dealing in power, within and outside Afghanistan - always more reformers-from-above than revolutionaries. The "revolution" they made together with Khalq, though the prelude to an energetic attempt at reform from above, was only a "revolution" in the state apparatus. Within that attempt Parcham represented a cautious, long-term approach that, in fact, differed not all that much from Daud's approach.

Parcham was also more generally "modern-minded" than Khalq. It had a civilised attitude to women. It had women members and one nationally prominent woman leader, Dr Anahita Ratebzad. Here too they were flesh of the flesh of the non-Stalinist reformers from above, who in terms of women's rights, made the most important reforms in Afghanistan's history, in the 1960s - reforms that, unlike what the post-Saur-Revolution Stalinists would decree, came into effect, and had more than a paper meaning.

Though Khalq was composed of people of the same social groups as Parcham, they were from their lower layers - teachers for example - and people of rural, and entirely Pashtun, origin. Though in power they would show a startling lack of astuteness in dealing with rural Afghanistan, they had more connections than Parcham with the countryside. More "outsider", less enmeshed with the upper class reformers-from-above, more distant from power than Parcham, their ambitions were correspondingly more radical, more "left", and more "revolutionary". Perhaps because they were more rural in their roots, they were also, notably, less "modern-minded in relation to women. There were no prominent Khalq women, if there were Khalq women at all.

But these were very small organisations. Split or united, the PDPA would never be other than a small organisation. In 1973 professional US observers and analysts of "communist" phenomena put both Parcham and Khalq at only a few hundred members each.

After the PDPA split (1967)

In the late 1960s, foreign aid declined, there was an economic downturn, and job prospects worsened, especially for the educated aspirant state employees. It undermined the king's experiment in hybrid constitutionalism. The PDPAs grew. It was the time of spectacular student militancy all over the world, from the USA to Rome, London and Warsaw. It found echoes in Afghanistan. The students wanted to modernise Afghanistan and secure their own futures. They demonstrated for changes in the law and also for the pass mark at the university to be cut to 50%. Both PDPAs were involved*.

The student segment of the Afghan elite were at this time what the military officers would be in the late 1970s, the striking force of the PDPA. For example, in October 1965, Karmal organised mass student demonstrations and a student occupation of Parliament.

The issue was opposition to the king's candidate for Prime Minister, Dr Mohammed Yussef. The king was forced to retreat and appoint someone else.

There was also unrest in the small Afghan working class in this period. For example, there were 19 labour strikes and demonstrations in May-June 1968. Trotsky once observed of the student unrest in Russia at the turn of the 20th century that the students were to the workers as the leaves at the top of the tree to the rest of the tree. The leaves at the top move first in a gathering wind, but eventually the tree moves; the student "leaves" at the top of the tree were but harbingers of the deeper working-class movement. The working class moved in Kabul, but it was a tiny force, puny in relation to cities which were puny in relation to the country. It did not develop independent working-class politics. Working-class aspirations to transform society were not sustainable in 1960s Afghanistan. That fact was one of the preconditions for what happened in the 1970s.

Even in its most militant phase, Parcham was tied closely to the forces around ex-prime-minister Daud. During the student demonstrations of 1969, the most militant in the long history of Afghan student unrest and dissatisfaction, Parcham acted as a link between Daud and the more militant students. For example, Parcham arranged for Daud to come in his Rolls Royce behind student demonstrations. This was thought likely to deter police violence - and it could not but help to build support for Daud. It is an example of how Parcham overlapped with Daud.

Parcham's paper was suppressed in June 1969 after a massive student strike and government lock out the previous month. Parcham collaboration and interlacing with the Daudites were now comprehensive and would lead to Parcham joining Daud's government after the 1973 coup. It would also lead to Parcham losing out in the competition with Khalq, which, remaining far more independent, would grow decisively while Parcham was tied to Daud.

Towards Mohammed Daud's coup (1973)

The post-1963 regime had run into difficulties by the late 1960s. The king had raised hopes he could not fulfil and thereby had bred only disillusion and disappointment. As we have seen, there was economic decline, less foreign aid, and jobs and job prospects for students and graduates were correspondingly cut back. By the end of the 1960s, political stability had been shattered. Afghanistan's rate of growth and development gave no one grounds for satisfaction. In 1971-2 the country experienced drought and, in some areas, famine. The forces that created the PDPAs had been quiet while the "pro-Russian" Daud ruled, but now they were in active opposition, allied to Daud, helping whip up and organise the latest of the recurrent student and intellectual opposition movements into a strong movement of mass demonstration and strikes. That was part of the ferment that led to Daud's 1973 coup.

Daud had for ten years been out of power. The legislation banning members of the royal family other than the king from political high office forbade his return to power. Yet around Daud dissident layers of the Establishment grouped themselves, most importantly a group of airforce and army officers, many of them educated by the USSR. The conflict between Zahir and Daud divided the ruling class elite more seriously than at any time since 1929. The opposition was broad and powerful. About 50 key officers took part in discussions between Daud, the Parcham leaders and the USSR-trained airforce and army officers on what had gone wrong in 1953-63. Many did not yet feel obliged to choose between Parcham and Daud, whose forces overlapped.

Daud, though he was about to lead a sort of "bourgeois revolution" from above in the 1973 coup, operated still as a feudal chief: this modernising current was a primitive, pre-modernist, personalist movement around the Sardar, the chief. Daud relied on personal loyalty, not on ideas or programme, to hold his forces together and in step. He would be disabused. By the 1970s other factors, other modes and determinants, were loose in Afghanistan. After experiencing Daud in power again, an important section of the Daudite military would go over to the PDPA, propelled by views about what had "gone wrong" before 1963 and in 1973-8 and seeking a firmer and more comprehensive drive towards "socialism". That would be a big factor in making the Stalinists' April 1978 Saur Revolution possible. Of the non-communist Third-World "pro-Russian" leaders of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, Daud would be the only one eaten up by his one-time partners. There was another sort of opposition too - Islamic political fundamentalism. There had been ferment amongst urban Muslim intellectuals since the turn to Russia in the mid 1950s. Like the Stalinists of the proto-PDPA in the first Daud period (1953-63), they too had had their "discussion groups", and an important base at Kabul University. In May 1970, the Muslim Brotherhood organised rallies and demonstrations in Kabul, calling for a jihad against socialism and democracy. There was also a feeble strand of "progressive" political Islam organised around certain mullahs. In 1971-2 the PDPA led a wave of strikes. But the working class dimension was an utterly subordinate element in the build up to Daud's and Parcham's 1973 coup. Neither the 1973 nor the April 1978 "revolution" was shaped, led, made, or influenced by the tiny working class. Economic downturn, disappointment with the 1963 reforms, a ruling class more seriously divided than at any time since 1929: in some respects, Afghanistan in 1973 approximated to Lenin's definition of the three prerequisites for revolution. The rulers could not go on in their old way; key sections, at least, of the people did not want to go on in the old way; and there was a viable alternative, driving for revolution. The future would be shaped by the ways in which Afghan reality differed from Lenin's formula.

Lenin's conditions for revolution were there in urban Afghanistan - in Kabul and the bigger towns. But the towns were not representative of Afghanistan. They were centuries ahead of most of the country. If during the French Revolution of the 18th century, important sections of backward rural France embodied counter-revolution - the VendŽe - and suffered massacre and repression in their war with the revolution, in this case the whole of rural Afghanistan was an enormous VendŽe waiting to be ignited. Afghanistan also diverged from Lenin's formula in that those driving for revolution were part of the old elite. They had more in common with enlightened despots and modernising rulers such as Frederick, Peter and Catherine (all called "The Great") then with any popular revolutionary movement. The urban forces of revolution were not a mass movement, or a movement able to evoke, rouse, or lead, a mass popular revolution. This fact expressed and defined the essential nature of Afghanistan's 1973 republican "bourgeois revolution", as of its April 1978 bureaucratic Stalinist continuation and successor.

Sardar Daud's republic (1973-8)

On the night of 16-17 July 1973, officers led by Mohammed Daud and backed by the PDPA organised a more or less bloodless military coup. King Zahir Shah abdicated and Daud - the king's first cousin and brother in law - declared Afghanistan a Republic. He became its President.

A Republican Central Committee would rule. The symbiotic interpenetration of all layers of the elite in Afghanistan is made clear by two facts. The Minister of the Interior before the 1973 coup, the person whose job it was to prevent such a coup, Nehm Atullah Pazhwole, was a - secret - member of the Parcham PDPA! And the key organisers of the 1973 Daud coup would also, in 1978, be the organisers of the Stalinist coup, the "Great Saur Revolution".

1973 was a species of national bourgeois revolution, the best the progressive section of the Afghan elite could do. Parcham helped organise it, and some of Daud's officers were also Parchamis; indeed Parcham's leaders were central to it. Perhaps as many as 50 people in Daud's entourage were, loosely, Parchamis. Daud abolished the Constitution, suspended parliament, banned political activity. The ban on political activity was partial, however. Parcham could open a public headquarters. Parcham was in government; half of Daud's ministers in 1973 were Parchamis. President Daud's first Deputy Prime Minister, Hassan Sharq, was Parchami.

Khalq, though it offered its support to the government (and in 1974 combined this with urging the exclusion of Parcham), was excluded from power. The relation between the Daudites and Parcham at this point was, though the details differ, reminiscent of the symbiosis between the Chinese Communist Party and Chiang Kai Shek's Guomindang in the Chinese Revolution of 1926-27 - but with a radically different outcome. Chiang Kai Shek slaughtered the Communists in 1927; in Afghanistan, as we shall see, ultimately the PDPA would slaughter Daud.

Daud, back in power in crisis-ridden Afghanistan, was at first the old pro-USSR Daud. For the Parchamis it was back to the pre-1963 days, except that now they had a substantial though subordinate share of power. Links with Russia had never been weakened, but now, at first, they were intensified. By 1977 115 enterprises were being built with Russian help and 70 were already in operation. In 1974, Daud signed a mutual "most favoured nation" trade deal with the USSR; in 1976 a long-term trade agreement was signed. Cars, cotton processing machinery, etc. came to Afghanistan from the USSR. and of course Afghans continued to be trained in civil and military technological skills in the USSR. Sections of the educated Afghan elite were already symbiotic with the bureaucratic elite in the USSR. That would increase. Between 1971 and 1974 500 Afghan students went for higher education to the USSR; 22% of Afghan specialists educated abroad went to the USSR. By now most Afghan medical doctors had been trained in the USSR. By 1977 3,700 officers had been trained in the USSR.

As we have seen, conflicts with Pakistan over "Pashtunistan" had been much more important than geographical proximity to the USSR in determining the closeness of Afghanistan's relations with the USSR. After 1973, Daud's foreign policy, too, was at first what it had been: he pursued not only "Pashtunistan" - the cause which had pushed Afghanistan into Russia's Cold War orbit - but also "Baluchistan". (Baluchis, too, live on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border).

Militant commitment to Pashtunistan, which had been central to the modernising oppositions such as "Awakening Youth", had defined Afghan nationalism - and defined it as Pashtun nationalism. It was also central to Afghan Stalinism. Both Parcham and Khalq were Pashtun and very much partisans of "Pashtunistan". But in the mid-1970s Daud began to shift away from a central concern with Pashtunistan. After a quarter-century of animosity, he attempted to establish friendlier relations with Pakistan. This implied a loosening of relations with the USSR, or even a sharp turn away. Daud, of course, was neither Stalinist, nor a willing USSR puppet: he had his own goals and intentions. Deliberately he began to distance Afghanistan from the USSR. He began to weaken the power of Parcham.

The evidence suggests that Daud, as he strove to lessen Afghanistan's dependence on the USSR, seriously misunderstood how things stood, and failed to anticipate that a decisive segment of the airforce and army could be taken over by the PDPAs. Daud sought and was promised an Iranian subsidy to the tune of $2 billion (in fact it was never delivered). Iran, which shares a border with Afghanistan, was then a regional "sub-imperialist" great power, and the USA's ally. Daud asserted Afghanistan's independence from the Russian bloc by condemning Cuba's "intervention" in Angola where, financed by the USSR, it acted as Russian proxy. In September 1975 Daud dismissed 40 USSR-trained officers. He sought facilities for training Afghan military offices in England and Egypt. The head of the airforce and a key organiser of Daud's coup, Colonel Abdul Kader, was disgraced and dismissed for saying that Daud's progress towards socialism was too slow. His demotion to the position of head of the Kabul military slaughterhouse was one of the decisive acts on the road that would lead to Afghanistan itself being turned into an enormous slaughterhouse. By late 1974, Parcham leader Babrak Karmal was under de facto house arrest, though the full break was still two years away.

After the Afghan pattern of hard and soft repression, alternating and combined, Parcham people were demoted and dismissed, some exiled overseas in Afghanistan's diplomatic service. But it was a selective purge to weaken Parcham's power and increase Daud's freedom of action: until 1976 there would still be Parchamis both in the government and in Daud's personal entourage. Daud would finally kick Parcham away early in 1977. (There is a curious symmetry between Parcham's experience of being kicked away by Daud after they had helped install him in power, and what Khalq did to them after the 1978 coup). But this was no longer the same USSR as the one with which Daud had safely allied in the 1950s and 1960s. Nor were its devotees in Afghanistan, the PDPA, what they had been. As a result of the USSR's long-time influence, they now had, and were rapidly augmenting, special assets - de facto control of important sections of the Afghan state machine.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Russian influenced Third World Communist Parties had docilely seconded "progressive" rulers and, in Egypt, they even dissolved its own organisation in deference to the Nasserite party. The policy of the Afghan Stalinists in their pre-PDPA phase had been a variant of that pattern. But by the mid-1970s Russia was in an aggressive, expansionary phase. Stalinist victory over the USA in Indochina, and the setting up of Stalinist states there, seemed to have changed the balance of power against the USA and its allies. Quasi-Stalinist "anti-capitalist" revolutions and quasi-Stalinist USSR-client regimes had emerged in Africa. Just as the US military effort was collapsing ignominiously in Indochina, a Russian-financed Cuban Stalinist army crossed the seas to Africa to intervene in Angola. In Ethiopia, Angola and South Yemen - in fact, everywhere it thought it safely could - Russia pursued, with seeming success, an active expansionary foreign policy, linking up with client regimes that appeared to be following the Cuban pattern of radical-dictatorial regimes not initially Stalinist moving towards the USSR model and alliance with the USSR. The full-scale invasion of Afghanistan would be the culmination of this phase of Russian foreign policy.

The PDPA coup of April 1978 was also part of it.

Preparing the "Great Saur Revolution"

Parcham had shared power. Khalq had not. In fact, when Khalq had been harried by the government, the Parchamis had actively participated in the persecution. In power, Parcham had forfeited the advantages of opposition. Trading acceptance of responsibility for only a share of power, and not the decisive share, Parcham inevitably suffered from disillusionment and impatience which undermined the Daud regime. Khalq had no such problem. Though it would have joined Daud's government if it could, in fact it had not.

While Parcham was enmeshed with Daud and part of his government, Khalq, with Taraki as theorist and politician and Amin as organiser and main practical man of business, built the decisive forces that would make the "Great Saur Revolution". They recruited the decisive leaders of the most important sections of the armed forces, those who could control Afghan state power. The proto-PDPA before 1965, and then the PDPA, had military connections, and probably some military cells; Parcham had the initial successes in organising officers. But from the 1973 Daud coup, Khalq, concentrating almost exclusively on the military, reaped the harvest that the Russian connection had sown.

The goals of modernisation and development, and acceptance of a central role for the state in the economy, were common ground in Afghanistan's elite: differences concerned the extent of statification. That common ground, together with disappointment at the failures of Daud after 1973, helped convince many of the military elite that Khalq, and then the reunited PDPA, offered a solution. The USSR wanted a coup; for them, the situation was by the mid-1970s not only ripe but overripe. Khalq's ability to recruit Daudite officers shows how ripe conditions were.

Khalq's concentration on military recruitment was part of a project, a plan for a special sort of revolution. A party as small as the PDPA, in a non-revolutionary situation, could realistically steer in a straight line for "revolution" only if the projected revolution did not depended on its own forces. As we saw in the passage from his official biography quoted at the head of this article, after April 1978 Taraki would boast that he had conceived of and carried out a new form of revolution. In fact it was a very old form - military coup - but with the tiny PDPA in control of the military.

The reunified PDPA (1977-8)

Once Parcham was out with Daud, once the whole orientation towards Daud had ended as it had, the reunification of Parcham and Khalq became a possibility. The Russians wanted it, and insisted on it. By now, Parcham was by far the lesser force both among PDPA members and, most importantly, in its implantation in the officer corps. It was not Parcham but Khalq that that reaped what the Russians and modern Afghan history had sown.

All the moves in this period strongly suggest systematic preparation of the "instrument" that would carry out the Saur coup. The coup was probably the USSR's project, or a project of a section of the USSR state - maybe the KGB. It was, in that respect, and at the other end of the Stalinist Empire, a variation on what had happened a decade earlier, in 1968, when Czechoslovakia had looked set to loosen its ties to the Stalinist bloc. Only the mechanics, the techniques, were, at first, different. In Czechoslovakia the invasion came first.

When the Russians had invaded Czechoslovakia in August 1968 the Russian ruling class had proclaimed the "Brezhnev Doctrine". Where "socialism" had been established, the USSR and its "Warsaw Pact" would not peacefully let it be overthrown. Afghanistan had effectively been a client state of the USSR. With the active participation of Afghan Stalinist forces, Daud, the pro-USSR dictator of the 1950s and early 1960s, had made a "pro-USSR" coup in 1973. Having got that far, the USSR would not just let Afghanistan move out of its orbit. The countdown to the Stalinist coup began once Daud's new international direction became clear.

In July 1977, exactly four years after Mohammed Daud's coup and just nine months before the "Great Saur Revolution", the two PDPAs held a unification conference. Though Khalq was three times bigger than Parcham, a Central Committee with equal numbers of Khalq and Parcham was created. This was a Russian-enforced shotgun marriage.

Secretly, they set their goal as the deposition of the royal Republican Daud. They decided to create "mass organisations" of women, peasants and youth. There are no reliable figures for the numbers involved in the joint Parcham-Khalq PDPA Mark 2, but nine months later, after the coup, the PDPA claimed to have 8,000 members. The CIA and other professional Stalinist-watchers put the figure at not more than half of that.

The PDPA was not only a creature of the towns, but disproportionately Kabul-centred, though very small even in Kabul. Ninety per cent of the population of Afghanistan lived in villages. More than that: politically the party was politically underdeveloped and primitive. The PDPA's leaders, writers and speakers and their deeds in power testify to that. Its ignorance of the countryside - and specifically Khalq's ignorance, though Khalq had stronger rural connections - would be a factor in what happened when they seized state power.

The "Great Saur Revolution" (April 1978)

On 27 April 1978, Afghan Stalinism launched its bid for power in the form of another military coup. Indeed, organised by the same leading military men, it looked remarkably like the same military coup as that of July 1973, but this time against Daud. There was about it something of military leaders taking back what they had given Daud, to bestow it elsewhere.

With the PDPA also there was an element of seizing now for itself what it had in the past bestowed on Daud. Five years experience had politically reshaped some of the formerly Daudite officers, and not only those who were already PDPA or close to it in 1973. Daud had moved too slowly towards "socialism". He was not fully committed to the USSR model, and of course he had begun to veer away from the USSR itself. The inadequacy of what Daud had achieved, coming to power amidst economic collapse, measured against what the urban elite urgently felt Afghanistan needed - that was the spur. That widespread feeling among not-quite-PDPA officers is what gave the tiny PDPA and its officers the initiative. The founder of Parcham and its political-theoretical leader, Mir Akhbar Kyber, was assassinated on 17 April 1978 in Kabul. Two men came to his home and shot him dead. It is likely that Khalq, or the Amin segment of Khalq, killed him. Bitter hostilities and rivalries between Khalq and Parcham were still rampant in the "united" PDPA. Those denounced for the killing by Daud's police, the brothers Mir Siddiq Alemyar and Mir Aref Alemyar, would be given high office under Amin, and would later be shot by Parcham, in June 1980.

Variously blaming the CIA and the Muslim Brotherhood, the PDPA organised Kyber's funeral as a large protest demonstration in Kabul. Ten to fifteen thousand people took part. In response Daud attempted a large-scale crackdown on the PDPA.

Daud's police arrested seven leaders of the PDPA - Taraki, Karmal, Amin and four others. Symptomatically, a Khalq agent in Daud's intelligence system, Lieutenant Colonel Pacha Sarbaz, gave Amin, the organiser of Khalq's military men, advance warning. The other leaders were held incommunicado in jail. Amin, the lynchpin organiser, was held only under house arrest and thus left in a position to trigger what must have been a prepared coup. The initiative lay with the PDPA's military men, who now acted under Khalq's and Amin's control.

It has been suggested that, though the PDPA had been preparing for a military rising - probably set for August 1979 - the Parcham leaders were, in April, pulled along behind Khalq and Amin. But only some details of what happened were happenstance and accident. The main lines of development - a military coup at the moment the PDPA chose - would have been the same. Everything points to that.

Unlike 1973, which was a bloodless coup, 1978 was a very bloody, fierce and merciless battle for control of the state between sections of the armed forces. As many as 10,000 people died. Daud and 18 members of his family were killed. Of 1,800 members of Daud's bodyguard, the Republican Guard, there were few survivors, and those were later killed in jail. Perhaps 30,000 people were wounded.

The ferocity showed that something very serious was happening: it also pointed to the high-Stalinist ferocity that would soon find outlet in the PDPA factions slaughtering each other. But this, nonetheless, was a coup, a struggle for power among the samurai, not a revolution. The people were not involved - not at all, not even as a token gesture by the PDPA towards "Marxism". The people of Afghanistan were objects, not subjects, in the "Great Saur Revolution".

The PDPA in power (1978-9)

For a few days after the putschists had won control in Kabul, power was said to reside in a Military Revolutionary Council, with Lieutenant Colonel Abdul Kader, returned from the Kabul slaughterhouse, as Head of State. On 1 May 1978 the "military" designation was dropped. The Military Revolutionary Council became the Revolutionary Council. Taraki was named Head of State, President and Prime Minister. Babrak Karmal was named First Deputy Prime Minister. Amin was another Deputy Prime Minister. The state was renamed the "Democratic Republic of Afghanistan".

The new rulers denied that they were "communist" or "Marxists", or that the Afghan state had ceased to be "non-aligned". They addressed Pakistan and Iran as brother Islamic states. They solicited aid from sources other than Russia. Their Russian ties, the new leaders said, would be no greater than Daud's. Their country was "free and neutral".

At first this won widespread international belief. The Saur Revolution was not at first widely seen as "communist". This was a revolution by the old state machine and a segment of the existing elite, not their overthrow.

They insisted they were Afghan nationalists, concerned to modernise and develop the country. They denounced Daud's backsliding after the 1973 coup. The government declared itself devoutly Muslim. One article of the credo of State - a continuation of an article in the 1977 Daud constitution - said: "Internal policy is based on the foundations of the sacred Islamic religion".

"We are free and move ahead according to the circumstances prevailing in our society," a press conference was told in Kabul in June 1978. Guarantees were offered to private property; bank deposits were declared inviolable by the government. But from the beginning the government committed itself to land reform. Taraki said the "present stage" was one of national democratic revolution. This was disingenuous. As Taraki would soon begin to boast, this was a "communist" revolution such as had not been seen before.

The "Great Saur Revolution" was a political revolution, something on top of and not in society. Even as such, it was peculiar because the Afghan state had only a loose and distant relationship with rural Afghanistan - with 90% of its people. The Stalinists in fact now had "the power"; and yet they had a great deal less power than they seem to have believed they had.. There was always an element of blundering and misunderstanding, of people who had gone to the wrong place, the weak state of Afghanistan, for power.

Their internal programme - even in its drive to strengthen the state - was essentially an accelerated and intensified version of what Daud had been doing; their self-belief that they could do it was essentially a belief in the unbridled use of state power, of force, to shape society as they should choose to reshape it. This was their "communism": the goal of a forced-march social and economic development like that of Stalin's USSR, and a belief that state force was the sufficient and essential precondition for that. There were differences in degree here between Parcham and Khalq, but only in degree.

The way they had made their revolution - through the armed forces - could not but greatly reinforce the typical Stalinist belief in the self-sufficiency of force and of the state. It would disorient them and confuse them about who they were, where in social history they were, and what they could hope to do. It would help undo the native Afghan Stalinist regime.

In terms of achievements Daud was, as has already been said, by a wide margin the most effective reformer and moderniser of 20th century Afghanistan. From about 1950 (when he was a minister, before becoming Prime Minister in 53) he had created an Afghan army by deliberately elevating officers from minor nationalities in an effort to knit together an Afghan state above the big ethnic groups. With USSR help - like Chiang Kai Shek in the 1920s - he had strengthened the state. After 1973 Daud nationalised the banks, fixed working hours, instituted paid leave, improved education and made a beginning with medical care. The land reform the PDPA announced in 1978 was more impressive - on paper, not in life. In fact, everything that socialists and consistent democrats can approve of in the PDPA regime's reform decrees existed largely on paper, not in reality. Those that had any effect on Afghan society produced opposite results to the goals proclaimed.

Criticising Michael Bakunin in 1870, Karl Marx had said what needs to be said about the post-Saur regime. The "charlatan and ignoramus" Bakunin proclaimed "the abolition of inheritance" as the "first requirement" of the social revolution. But:

"If you have had the power to make the social Revolution in one day... you would abolish at once landed property and capital, and would therefore have no occasion at all to occupy yourself with le droit d'heritage. On the other hand, if you have not that power (and it is of course foolish to suppose such a power) the proclamation of the abolition of inheritance would be not a serious act, but a foolish menace, rallying the whole peasantry and the whole small middle class round the reaction. Suppose, for instance, that the Yankees had not had the power to abolish slavery by the sword. What an imbecility it would have been to proclaim the abolition of inheritance in slaves. The whole thing rests on a superannuated idealism, which considers the actual jurisprudence as the basis of our economical state, instead of seeing that our economical state is the basis and source of our jurisprudence. As to Bakunin, all he wanted was to improvise a programme of this own making..."

(Karl Marx, letter to Paul Lafargue, 19 April 1870).

Taraki would have answered that he had the power meaning concentrated, state-organised, force. But the central truth here was put succinctly by Marx: "Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one". Afghanistan was pregnant with no new society, and Taraki looked to force to work miracles. Frederick Engels, discussing the role of force in history, wrote in Anti-DŸhring:

"It is not by any means true that 'the primary must be sought in direct political force and not in any indirect economic power'. On the contrary. For what in fact does 'the primary' in force prove to be? Economic power..."

The experience of Stalinism everywhere, in which political force seemed all-powerful for so long, would ultimately prove Engels right - even in the most advanced Stalinist societies. Afghanistan, the most backward, would produce only a bloody caricature of Stalinism elsewhere. The gap between Kabul and most of Afghanistan meant that the first task of those aspiring to do what the PDPA aspired to do would have to be the military conquest of the country.

The PDPA government's public programme was not their "full" one. Amin would proclaim the goal of the revolution to be a "full socialist" society "with collectivised agriculture and the elimination of the private retail sector". Obfuscation and conflicting statements dominated. Unguarded comments, alternating with subterfuge, camouflage and pledges to Islam, would continue even after the Russian invasion.

What the PDPA regime did was clear enough however. Within a month, over 20 new agreements were concluded with the USSR and USSR "advisers" had tripled their number.

The comment by Amin about "full socialism" indicated a cauterising ultra-Stalinist programme to be implemented as soon as the PDPA was strong enough to carry it through. Collectivisation of agriculture makes sense or not depending on whether or not agricultural machinery is available; whether it is voluntary or compulsory is largely decided by the advantages the farmers would see in it. Even with imported Russian machinery, it would be a long way ahead in terms of general economic development in Afghanistan, and a considerable time, before collectivisation would be other than a fantasy or an attempt by a totalitarian state to slave-drive the people - or both.

In power, the tiny group of PDPA people ensconced in a bureaucratic state machine faced the peoples of Afghanistan as an antagonistic force. They would discover that though power grows out of the barrel of a gun, they had not sufficient power to make a revolution - and that there were a lot of other gun-empowered forces in Afghanistan ready to contest the power with them.

What social forces had made this revolution? Not the Afghan peoples or any of the subordinate classes of Afghanistan. Even passive support was limited to a section of the urban population. The PDPA was very small: we saw that the highest PDPA claim for its membership was 8,000, and that the real figure in April 1978 may have been half that. The party was essentially an organisation of the pro-Russian elite. Its strength and power lay in the officers of the armed forces, especially of the technologically most advanced parts of it, the air force and tank regiments, and among intellectuals and others within and on the fringes of the state machine.

How many officers were PDPA? Again, suggested figures vary. The PDPA claimed 2,000, 20-25% of the officer corps. Western (CIA, etc.) analysts put the number of PDPA (Khalq and Parcham) officers, in April 1978, at 200.

The conscript army was 80,000 strong. History knows examples of hybrids, of armies that were also parties and parties that were also armies, from Cromwell's Ironsides to Mao's "Red Army". The new Afghan military elite which had been formed under Russian influence, or the key segment of it which became the spearhead of Afghan Stalinism, was not one of those. The Stalinist officers' relationship with the rank and file was military and hierarchical, never a political leadership capable of rousing large numbers to action.

A very small group of PDPA, mainly Khalq, was attempting to drive a military machine, constructed for another purpose, as an engine of revolution in a country in which they had virtually no support outside of Kabul. It was a variant of the East European Stalinist revolutions carried out in the late 1940s from within the state machine. There, Stalinists had been installed in the key positions, specifically in control of the police and army, not by a military coup, but by the Russian Army. They stealthily and slowly, piece by piece, using what Matyas Rakosi in Hungary called "salami tactics", remoulded the East European societies. Here the PDPA was trying to apply the same method to a primitive society in which the writ of the state machine they now controlled scarcely existed outside the cities.

The meaning of the Great Saur Revolution

In the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels observe that in serious class struggle there is either the victory of the progressive class or the mutual ruination of the contending classes. The war between town and country is a form of class struggle. In Afghanistan that war - it became open war soon after the April 1978 coup - intertwined with a Russian war of colonial conquest and resistance to it, to bring ruin and destruction to Afghanistan comparable to the destruction inflicted on Germany during the Second World War.

Let us try to sum up what the Stalinist revolution in Afghanistan was. The "Saur Revolution" was a very bloody though brief civil war between sections of the armed forces - fought, lost and won, above the heads of the people, even the people of Kabul. There was not even the mimicry, or the pretence of working-class action such as the PDPA could perhaps have arranged - strikes in Kabul, for example - had it wanted to pretend, had it felt any need to square what it was doing with the hypocritical formulas and the pious dogmas of even the Stalinists elsewhere. That was not what the PDPA was about. The PDPA believed itself to have found a new road to revolution.

As we saw in the quotation at the head of this article, the new head of state, Taraki, claimed that the PDPA had found a way to "wrest political power through a shortcut" via the armed forces. Learning from Daud in 1973, the PDPA decided that it could go into the coup business for itself; and could in that way arrive at the same relationship to society that the USSR-imposed regimes in Eastern Europe had by the mid-1940s.

By infiltration of the air force and army officer corps, the PDPA used sections of the state apparatus to suppress and destroy the rest of it, and took over the state. Many details were different, but in its own peculiar way, adroitly using the strength and influence of Russia in Afghanistan, the PDPA had put itself in the position of the East European Stalinist parties after 1945 - or so it looked from the top, anyway. Russia was both prerequisite and prime mover, in Afghanistan as in Eastern Europe, though in Afghanistan it worked its effects through decades of influence and primary selection of the elements of a Stalinist bureaucracy out of the Afghan elite and not through invasion. Invasion would come not at the beginning of the process, as in Eastern Europe, but when it failed.

After the "Great Saur Revolution" the PDPA had the state power, and they had immediate Russian help on every level. The efforts of the previous "developers" of Afghanistan, and in the first place of Daud, provided them with a state stronger than anything Amanullah 50 years before could dream of - a conscript army of 80,000 men. Yet the issue was still between one sort of reform from above, one programme of development, and another. "Revolution" here could only be a political revolution, on the level of the state. In the Afghanistan of 1978 there was no ripe or developed society or economy, ready to burst out of constraints and restrictions. There was no social revolution - not even a bourgeois revolution - there for the making, waiting to break out of the restraining shell of the old society.

The state could be taken by force. But society? Every Stalinist state, beginning with Stalin's "Second Revolution" in the USSR after 1928, was unripe for rational or democratic collectivism, and its rulers had to adapt their programme to that fact, combining precocious collectivism with the work of development done in the advanced countries by capitalism. It was not the working-class "expropriation of the expropriators", as will be socialism when it emerges from advanced capitalism, but a matter of the exploitative totalitarian state bureaucracy statifying everything it could in order to eliminate small-bourgeois competition for a share of the wealth, acting to develop the forces of production, telescoping stages of development that took decades and centuries in Western Europe. Not socialism, but developmentalism under totalitarian rule - that was Stalinism. Trotsky once described the bureaucracy, in its relations with one of the oppressed nationalities of the USSR, the Ukraine, as "the rapists of the Kremlin". There is that aspect at the heart of every Stalinist revolution. The Stalinists raped History, who eventually took her revenge. But in Afghanistan, History proved more, and more immediately, resistant.

While the PDPA and the pro-PDPA officers firmly controlled the state, they did not, as events would very soon show, control Afghanistan. The PDPA and the officers had only made a coup, not a revolution. They did not understand the difference between a coup and a revolution, or between what the bureaucracy in the USSR and its all-powerful state routinely did to the pinned-down people, and what the PDPA proposed to do to the peoples of rural Afghanistan.

They would soon learn the difference.

They had power only in the cities. Rural Afghanistan was still, after decades of "reform from above", suspicious of the central state power; many men bore arms, and many lived in a vast expanse of mountains and hills from which in the past both central government and foreign invaders - most recently, the British in 1919 - had been successfully resisted.

The PDPA in power mimicked the Russian bureaucratic elite. Immediately all the obscene paraphernalia of Stalinist style and language, worship of the "Great Leader" (Taraki), and so on, blossomed forth. They seem to have thought that within certain limitations - like making a few would-be bamboozling noises about their respect for Islam - they could behave as an all-powerful bureaucracy like the Chinese and Russian bureaucracies. They acted as if the state could command the social and economic forces and tides by its decrees, as if their "Revolution" were already made, as if their state could relate to society as an irresistible totalitarian force - the sort of force that had turned the USSR upside down in the 1930s, and done the same in China more recently. They acted as if they thought that they, like the rulers of the USSR, China, North Korea, etc, could do anything they liked with an atomised and defenceless population. But the population was not defenceless. The PDPA did not have totalitarian power in Afghanistan. The Saur Revolution was the reductio ad absurdum of "revolution from above" because of its strange military-bureaucratic "instrument" at one pole and its lack of popular support at the other - and, in general, because of the economic and social level of Afghanistan. Afghanistan had further to develop than any other Stalinist state. Power could be taken in Kabul for a proto-Stalinist bureaucracy; but then what? Amin might talk of collectivising agriculture and eliminating private retail. At Afghanistan's existing level of development such measures could only be bureaucratic formalities, and perhaps only on paper. That would be true even if Afghanistan were effectively annexed to the USSR.

Judicious state enterprise and economic activity could surely have helped develop Afghanistan. But if the Stalinist state, inheriting the traditional relationship of the Afghan state to society, that is its traditional weakness, encountered powerful resistance and provoked civil war, then not progress and development but regression and disintegration might follow. That is what did follow "Great Saur".

The coup produced spreading circles of resistance almost from the beginning. "Taking power" in Kabul, though bloody, proved comparatively easy for the PDPA; it had yet to "take power" in Afghanistan. Here the underlying identity with the Communist Parties in Eastern Europe, ensconced in their state machines, ceased, because it was a different sort of state. Because of their militarist-elitist notion of the "revolution", the Khalq-PDPA leaders went through the months between April 1978 and December 1979 as deluded, inept and increasingly desperate people, suffering from a hopelessly confused perspective on history, misunderstanding both their own place and that of the Russian bureaucracy - which they aped - in it.

The regime knew it lacked popular support. It never overcame that problem, not with the youth movement was initiated, not with its drive to build "trade unions" (controlled by a policeman and forbidden to strike), and not with its "Democratic Organisation of Afghan Women".

The regime never had and never managed to call forth sufficient active or even passive support in the population to carry through the reforms it promulgated. The relationship of even the PDPA's upfront reform programme to Afghan society - that is the relationship of the new rulers to Afghan society - is summed up in the fact that many peasants refused to take land under the land reform on the ground that for Muslims it is a sin to take other people's property. They had not been convinced even that they had reason for resentment about land ownership. The PDPA simply had no links with them.

When it decreed the peasants' debts to usurers - a major yoke on their necks - abolished, the result was an immediate drying-up of credit for the peasants and then a steep decline in agricultural production. The government was not in a position to organise an alternative system of credit. It is difficult to imagine quite what they thought they were doing: did they believe in magic? No, but they believed in the primitive magic of the Stalinist state.

Afghanistan responds to the Stalinist coup

Despite its public proclamations and readings from the Koran, the government immediately fell foul of the Muslim religious leaders. Already by late June 1978, eight religious groups had declared war on the government. Its first offence seems to have been insufficient consultation with the religious leaders. But the unavoidable conflict had secular roots too, in the fact that many of the religious leaders were landholders likely to be affected by land reform.

Ninety-nine per cent of Afghanistan's people were Muslims, 85% Sunni and the rest Shiite. By contrast with Iran, where the Shiite hierarchy formed a powerful cadre of what was a virtual mass party, the clergy in Afghanistan were not organised hierarchically, and therefore were less of a coherent national force. Nevertheless they were a very powerful force, and from the start the regime was opposed by a clergy commanding huge influence and wielding it in alliance with the landlord class and the royalists and the outsiders who increasingly took a hand in Afghan affairs to thwart the Russians.

When the government decreed its land reforms without having mobilised rural support, the clergy was able to rally mass opposition and the government had only the army to back it up. Within six weeks of the April 1978 coup, armed Muslim tribal bands were reported to be in rebellion against the new regime. But at first the rebellions were small-scale and localised. Opposition to central government, normally, even when dormant, a stable part of the outlook of the Sardars (chiefs), now became active opposition to the "pagan" and "infidel" regime.

The paradox is that what fuelled and spread the mass revolt, and fatally undercut the government, was its reform decrees - decrees that should have benefited many millions of Afghans, but in fact clumsily antagonised even their putative beneficiaries. In the 19th century, Russian populists who "went to the people" were beaten up by the peasants they sought to rouse and handed over by them to the Tsar's police. In Afghanistan after April 1978, the "reforming" government stood in something like the same relationship to those whom their reforms would ostensibly benefit.

The Taraki government decreed the abolition of peasant debt to the village usurers; drastic land reform; abolition of the practice of charging a bridal price for women; and, building on the reforms of the last 15 years, compulsory education, including education of girls. The PDPA's declared programme also included a seven hour day; an anti-illiteracy campaign; and some price controls. Land holdings were declared limited to a maximum of about seven hectares - a drastic levelling which alienated all the leaders of rural society. With the help of the priests, the rural ruling classes were able to mobilise most of those due to gain from the land reform against the government. Most of the upper layers, the "lords temporal and spiritual", of Afghanistan's semi-feudal and rigidly hierarchical society moved into opposition to the central government; and the revolt slowly spread until it threatened to overthrow the PDPA regime.

The PDPA found that they had little but increasingly naked force to back up their decrees. Had the ruling classes been able to overcome their endemic tribal and other divisions, and unite in opposition to the government, then the weight of the potentially overwhelming forces opposed to the PDPA and prepared to take up arms against it would probably have brought the PDPA regime down by mid-1979.

It would be a mistake in judging such a society from outside (or from "above", from the heights of state power, which is probably the point here) to assume a seething rebelliousness (as distinct from grievances) at the base of society. Far from it. Living as they did in rural isolation and medieval backwardness, the rural Afghans would have had to make an immense mental leap to reach the possibility of even conceiving of a different arrangement of society, let alone of committing themselves to a struggle to attain it by breaking up the existing social structures - pulling down their huts before any replacement was assured, to use Isaac Deutscher's image. That would be true even for the most oppressed of them, and even for those who felt themselves to be oppressed. And of course the fabric of such a society is woven from many ties of mutual responsibility and personal and family loyalties between the members of the different hierarchical layers, ties that remained intact after April 1978.

To revolutionise such a society, to wean the lower layers from the existing structures, more than decrees were needed. But - apart from brute force - only decrees were available. The revolutionary regime had not been installed by the people or a hegemonising section of the people. Not even the example and the prodding of substantial bourgeois areas in Afghan society, of areas that had developed beyond the semi-feudal level, was available. No part of Afghan society had achieved sufficient bourgeois/capitalist development to give the government an adequate base-area from which to begin to transform rural society, to suggest or provide alternatives to the semi-feudal relations around which the lives of the masses of rural Afghans were organised.

As we have seen, the central government did not even have the resources to organise an adequate alternative credit system when it decreed peasants' debts abolished - an act which should have benefited, and thus affected the attitudes of, millions of peasants.

Thus the decrees of the "infidel" central government and its disorganising "interference" appeared mainly as a disruptive intrusion and a threat to the rural poor. Because the government failed to ignite them against the upper social layers whom the nascent Stalinist bureaucracy aspired to replace, it had no alternative but to continue to rest, fundamentally, on the army, and on methods characteristic of armies, which are not the best tools of delicate social reform.

Even the land reform, designed to benefit the 700,000 landless peasants and millions of others, did not polarise rural Afghanistan to the benefit of the new rulers against the old, or rally a strong layer of the rural poor to the government which made the revolutionary decrees. It did not even generate enough passive support or tolerance to make a difference. Poor rural Afghans refusing to accept redistributed land became it was immoral to take another person's property: that was the level of the gap between the bureaucratically decreed social reform and rural Afghanistan.

Using slogans about the defence of Islam against the infidel government, the Sunni Muslim priests, and the landlords and royalists, rallied the people against the government before the government's decrees could even begin to achieve the beginnings of a class polarisation in the rural areas and allow the new elite to mobilise the poor against the old. The government's lack of a serious base in the population was decisive here. Which is only to say in a different way that the "Great Saur Revolution" was not a revolution, but a coup d'Žtat.

And of course the popular distrust of the PDPA regime was not just a misunderstanding that separated the peasants from those who only wanted their good - like the Russian peasants rejecting the revolutionaries from the cities who were honestly trying to liberate them. The PDPA's land reforms at best would have rallied the peasants to the aspirant bureaucratic ruling class forming itself around the new state power and helped it eliminate its opponents in the old ruling class. Time and again in Stalinist revolutions, such overtures had been followed by forced collectivisation. So here Allah did protect the Afghan peasants - by way of their responsiveness to such cries as defence of Islam - from being duped by the aspirant Stalinist ruling class.

To try to deflect the revolt, the Stalinist government stepped up its attempts to compete with the priests for the Islamic banner, mimicking their petrified obscurantism. On important occasions the "Marxist" revolutionary Taraki publicly prayed for the revolution in Kabul mosques. The 1,410th anniversary of the Koran was celebrated officially throughout the country.

The regime felt sufficiently sure of its standing here to denounce its Muslim opponents for "un-Islamic activities". They declared a jihad (holy war) against them in September 1978. Soon, after the empty decrees on land and women in the autumn of 1978, the forces against the government had gained sufficient strength to be able to declare their own "jihad" on the government, in March 1979.

The striking way in which the material interests of the ruling class were mixed together with the prejudices of the Muslim faith and with the enormous ignorance of the rural population was captured by an anonymous writer in the Economist. "In fact no restrictions had been imposed on religious practice: the mosques were always open, and were particularly thronged with worshippers during the Id festival last weekend. The Shari'a courts continued functioning.

The acts that were interpreted as anti-Islamic measures included the fact that the new regime ignored the religious leaders, the introduction of the red flag (removing the green of Islam), the enforced education of women (a first step, the mullahs claimed, towards their being sent to Russia to live lives of shame), the land reforms (many of the mullahs are landowners), and the use of the words 'comrade' and 'hurrah' (this cheer word, the mullahs said, was really the name of Lenin's mother)" (1 September 1979).

But maybe they'd heard about the "Lenin" m