FELIX ACKERMANN (Vilnius) und MICHAEL GALBAS (Konstanz)
Learning from the Soviet Union? Society’s treatment of Afghan War Veterans in a transnational perspective

MARKUS MIRSCHEL (Zürich)
„Our International Duty“ Pictural language of Soviet Photography between Authenticity and Orchestration

NATALYA DANILOVA (Exeter)
Veterans of the Soviet Afghan War: Fighting for Recognition

BEATE FIESELER (Düsseldorf)
Fighting over the Memory of War.
The Afghancy Enter the World of Veterans

SERGUEI A. OUSHAKINE (Princeton)
War’s Epistles: On Corresponding the Combat Experience

BERNHARD CHIARI (Potsdam)
Comment: Learning from the Soviet Union? The Withdrawl of the Bundeswehr from Afghanistan in 2014

Abstract:
The contributions in this section discuss from a transnational perspective, how state and society addressed the consequences of the Soviet-Afghan war of 1979 through 1989. Their aim is to analyze strategies for (re)integrating prevalently traumatized veterans of an asymmetric war into society, media and the legal order in a radically changing international context. Beyond an idealistic concept of successful (re)integration, the papers address the many contradictions between the soldiers’ self-perception, Soviet media coverage during the war and the post-war discourses confronting veterans with new social settings.
The concept of this panel is based on the assumption, that there is no direct link between individual traumatization during an asymmetrical war and the social concepts for overcoming it in the aftermath. However, the asymmetric nature of conflicts like the Soviet-Afghan War and the unwillingness of Soviet officials to address the violent character of the Soviet invasion, had a long term impact on the veterans and resurfaced in the newly emerging post-Soviet societies. The contributors to this section address the question, how various social protagonists and the former combatants themselves deal with their experiences from the Soviet-Afghan war.
In this context, the different social and political strategies, oscillating between disappearance and presence, will be compared to the veterans’ own perspective, an important group that organizes itself in different ways to reclaim the veterans’ own positions. This allows the identification of necessities and requirements for official and social strategies to legitimize asymmetric warfare, the participation of different actors in the war and the social techniques for coping with their medium-term effects. A final contribution will discuss possible parallels to today’s withdrawal from the Hindukush.