Valentin Ivanovich Varennikov

Varennikov’s Afghanistan career shows him less as the architect of the intervention than as the senior military official charged with ending an unwinnable war. From 1984 to 1989 he headed the Soviet Defence Ministry’s control group in Afghanistan, coordinating Soviet and Afghan operations and, after Mikhail Gorbachev decided to withdraw, managing the military conditions of the exit. Operation Magistral in 1988 secured the road toward the Pakistani border and reopened a supply route to the besieged garrison at Khost, a success for which Varennikov was awarded Hero of the Soviet Union.

Yet these operational achievements cannot be separated from the political failure of the war itself. Later accounts report that Varennikov had warned that the intervention could become a prolonged conflict, but as the senior commander he remained responsible for both its conduct and its withdrawal. When Soviet forces left in February 1989, he could present the operation as orderly and militarily successful, but the war left Afghanistan devastated and imposed a lasting burden on the Soviet system. This experience helps explain his later insistence on preserving state unity and strong central authority.

After 1991 Varennikov continued his political and public work after leaving military service. From 1993 he was a member of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and of its Central Committee; he was elected a State Duma deputy in 1995 and chaired the Duma Committee on Veterans' Affairs from 1996 to 1999. Re-elected on 7 December 2003 on the Rodina bloc list (third place on the federal list), he became deputy chair of the Veterans' Affairs Committee and co-chair of the Rodina faction, and as the oldest member of the newly elected Duma he opened its first sitting in January 2004. From 1997 to 2005 he headed the Russian Association of Heroes and created and headed the International League for the Defence of Human Dignity and Security. In 2008 he presented Joseph Stalin on the television project 'Name of Russia'. Dismissed from military service (retirement) together with Dmitry Yazov by President Yeltsin's decree No. 250 of 7 February 1994, he then wrote his memoirs: five books covering his whole life were published.

The question of responsibility is the heaviest part of his record. While heading the Main Operations Directorate from 1979 to 1984 he gave the order to shoot down Korean Air Lines flight KE007. In January 1991, as Deputy Defence Minister and Commander-in-Chief of the Ground Forces, he took part in the events in Vilnius, in which 14 people were killed and more than 700 wounded. The Lithuanian investigation established the guilt of 23 persons, among them Defence Minister Dmitry Yazov, KGB chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov and CPSU secretary Oleg Shenin; no Soviet official accepted responsibility, and Gorbachev said he had learned of the action only in the morning. Gorbachev aide Anatoly Chernyaev asserted that the decision to use the army was taken personally by Varennikov without agreement with the Soviet president, a contested attribution rather than an established fact. On his 1994 acquittal he likened Gorbachev and his circle to the Nazis he had fought half a century earlier and declared 'In August 1991 I confronted another enemy', saying he had no regrets at what he did but 'a bitter feeling that we failed to save our country'. He likewise continued to defend the Soviet war in Afghanistan even after the 1989 withdrawal.

After the August 1991 coup collapsed, twelve defendants associated with the State Committee on the State of Emergency (GKChP) were indicted for treason. When the Russian State Duma declared a political amnesty in February 1994, all the other defendants accepted it. But Varennikov refused amnesty and demanded a full trial. In court, he argued that he had never been a formal member of the GKChP and had merely followed the orders of his superior, Defence Minister Dmitry Yazov.

On 11 August 1994, the Military Collegium of the Russian Supreme Court acquitted Varennikov. The court found that he had acted on superior orders and could not have known those orders were illegal. The verdict stated that his actions were undertaken "only in the interest of preserving and strengthening his country." Emerging from the courthouse, Varennikov declared the acquittal "proof of Mikhail Gorbachev's guilt." He called on the Prosecutor General to charge Gorbachev with treason and demanded a parliamentary inquiry into the breakup of the Soviet Union.