A sober, extensive and resonant account of the Soviet war in Afghanistan.

The Great Gamble: The Soviet War in Afghanistan
By Gregory Feifer
HarperCollins, January 2009; Hardcover; 336 pages; $27.99

“There’s no military solution to the Afghanistan issue,” counseled a Soviet military official in 1979, just as the Red Army was preparing to invade. But the aging Politburo chiefs, seeing an opportunity to prop up a Communist government and cement Soivet influence in notoriously unstable Central Asia, did not listen; nor would the Bush administration some two decades later, when they convinced themselves that superior firepower alone could overwhelm the Afghan fighters. Both nations discovered too late how fiercely these fighters were prepared to defend their rugged land.

As Feifer demonstrates throughout The Great Gamble, this nearly decade-long war, along with the Chernobyl disaster, sapped the Soviet Union’s last ounce of strength. When the ailing Leonid Brezhnev was persuaded to use force in installing a puppet government in Kabul, the population rebelled, not in the name of some opposition leader, but because they had been fighting off invaders ever since Alexander the Great set foot on the Hindu Kush. Meanwhile, the poorly trained, perpetually underfed Red Army worked to alienate the populace with the kind of indiscriminate slaughter that more recently turned Chechnya into a charnel house. The resolute mujahadeen responded in kind, effectively harassing the Russians with guerilla warfare, resorting to terrifying tactics that included skinning captured soldiers alive.

Feifer chronicles the war in sober and extensive detail, focusing especially on how thoroughly the Soviet Union was unprepared for a war in the mountain ranges and narrow valleys where the Afghan fighters made their stand, at first with their own outdated weapons, then with the help of an international anti-Soviet coalition that included both a nascent al-Qaida and its principal sponsor, the CIA. He also reveals, quite plainly, that we are repeating many of the mistakes made by the Soviet Union. “Why should Afghans share our values and respect us?” a Russian veteran asks many years later, with Osama bin Laden ensconced in the mountains where he had once fought. “We invaded their country, robbed and killed them, then simply packed up and left. Why in the world wouldn’t terrorism grow there?”

You can read the first chapter here

Other Russia-related books out this month

The Bloody White Baron
By James Palmer
Basic Books, January 2009; Hardcover, 228 pages; $26.95
Travel writer James Palmer revisits the barely believable story of Baron Ungern-Sternberg, the demented aristocrat who conquered Mongolia in 1919 with a loose coalition of White Army soldiers, Siberians, Japanese, and native Mongolians. The baron’s dream of creating a horse-borne army to reclaim Russia from the Bolsheviks may sound funny, but add to that his personal blend of sadism, half-baked racialism and sloppy mysticism, and the portrait begins to resemble another 20th-century monster.

Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg
By Helen Rappaport
St. Martin's, February 2009; Hardcover; 272 pages; $29.95
Great, you’re thinking, another book about the last days of the Romanovs. But this one is sort of different! It focuses exclusively on their last two weeks, imprisoned together in Yekaterinburg, unaware of the political movements outside that would decide their fate. Rappaport even got together with a forensic expert to recreate exactly what happened in the “killing room.” In essence, the part of a Romanov biography that people skip to and read first has been expanded into an entire book.

Valentina: American Couture and the Cult of Celebrity
By Kohle Yohannan
Rizzoli, February 2009; 280 pages; $75.50
A design historian examines the life of fashion designer Valentina, a Ukrainian emigree and probably one of the first people in fashion to go sans surname. By being coy about her past and letting ballerina and duchess rumors circulate, Valentina preserved an air of mystery that helped solidify her authority on matters of style. The author lifts the veil to reveal… the rags-to-riches American dream narrative? Sigh. We would have pretended to be a duchess, too. Still, who can argue with full-color pictures?

The Romanov Bride
By Robert Alexander
Viking, Februrary 2009, 320 pages, $24.95
More Romanovs, but fiction this time. Grand Dutchess Elisavyeta, sister to Tsaritsa Alexandra, chooses life in a convent after her husband is killed by a revolutionary’s bomb. Pavel, a starving young Petersburger, swears vengeance against the Romanovs after his wife is killed by the tsar’s soldiers during a peaceful demonstration. But their paths don’t cross until after the revolution, on a cold Siberian night…