>the Soviet public couldn't understand what the USSR was even doing in Afghanistan. Profound changes were underway at home as Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of perestroika brought increased freedoms — and growing economic turmoil. With no Kremlin victory in sight, pundits increasingly drew comparisons to another draining Cold War quagmire — referring to the Afghanistan war as "the Soviet Vietnam."

>Less than three years after the Soviet pullout, the USSR was no more.

>"The veterans went from a status of being venerated to the condition where they were completely despised, and that was also projected onto the collapse of the Soviet state," says Princeton University professor Serguei Alex Oushakine, author of The Patriotism of Despair: Nation, War, and Loss in Russia. "For the bigger part of this new century, [Soviet] Afghan vets were sort of outcasts."
>"The USSR was gone and no one wanted to help us anymore," he recalls. "They say, 'Why should we? We didn't send you there.' "