The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan

by Gregory Feifer

Overview

An account of the USSR's defeat in Afghanistan drawing on many interviews with Soviet veterans: "Fascinating. . . . A highly readable history of the conflict." —The New York Times Book Review
In this groundbreaking account of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, former NPR Moscow correspondent Gregory Feifer vividly depicts the war that contributed greatly to the demise of the USSR, and that offers striking lessons for the twenty-first century as well. Told primarily from the perspective of the Russians who fought it, The Great Gamble offers valuable insight into the history of Afghanistan's troubled government and the rise of the mujahideen and Al-Qaeda.
"Feifer has done truly extraordinary research . . . For all its heft, [The Great Gamble] is an effortless read—an unusual and gratifying combination." —Minneapolis Star Tribune
"A provocative and important book, telling us what the Soviet military was thinking and feeling as it lost its war in Afghanistan. Gregory Feifer vividly shows that their campaigns there amounted to a manual of how not to do it." —Thomas Ricks, author of Fiasco
"Thoughtful, deliberative use of eyewitness testimony gives an intensely close-up sense of what the war was like for those who fought it." —Kirkus Reviews
"Brings to life in spirited detail the bloody, eight-year struggle that killed a million Afghans and tens of thousands of Russians and broke the back of the Soviet Union, which disappeared within two years of the war's end. You think it can't happen to us? Read Feifer." —Thomas Powers, Pulitzer Prize-winner and author of Heisenberg's War

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061984389
Publisher:	HarperCollins e-books
Publication date:	08/18/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	338
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

Gregory Feifer is the former Moscow correspondent for National Public Radio. He was educated at Harvard University and lives in Prague with his wife, Elizabeth, and son, Sebastian.

Gregory Feifer is a senior correspondent for Radio Free Europe who also writes for Foreign Affairs and the New Republic. Until recently, he was National Public Radio's Moscow correspondent, and has reported from Russia for almost a decade. During its resurgence under Putin, he filed from other former Soviet republics and across Russia, where he observed the effects of the country's vast new oil wealth on an increasingly nationalistic society as well as Moscow's rekindling of a new Cold War-style opposition to the West. In 2008, Feifer covered the Russia-Georgia war from the breakaway Georgian region of South Ossetia and traveled to Siberia, Belgrade and Berlin to produce a series on the Kremlin's use of Gazprom, the Russian gas monopoly, as an instrument of foreign policy.
Before joining NPR in 2005, Feifer -- whose mother is Russian -- lived in Paris and New York, and wrote for outlets including Agence France Presse and World Policy Journal. He witnessed the coup d'état attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991, and later, on a fellowship from the Institute of Current World Affairs, examined the end of the Yeltsin era and Russia's subsequent transformation into an authoritarian state.
Feifer is the author of The Great Gamble, a history of the Soviet war in Afghanistan and coauthor of Spy Handler with former KGB colonel Victor Cherkashin.