A Communist Party newspaper published for the first time Thursday a year-to-year breakdown of the 13,833 Soviet soldiers killed in Afghanistan and vowed the nation would never again send troops to fight in a secret war without parliamentary approval.
The daily Pravda also admitted for the first time that Soviet soldiers saw combat in Vietnam, Syria, Egypt "and other countries," and said these troops would receive the same benefits as Afghan veterans."For the first time a yearly breakdown of data on Soviet losses in Afghanistan has been published in the Soviet press," the Tass news agency said of the Pravda article.
Although the last Soviet troops left Afghanistan six months ago, ending the longest war in Soviet history, the Soviet public still has not been told which leaders of the Leonid Brezhnev era made the decision to dispatch troops to the war in December 1979.
"Those who fought - either those who perished or those who did not return from the war - cannot be answerable for the actions of people who covertly sent troops to a foreign country," Pravda said. "This is one of the conclusions.
"Another conclusion is that no group of people, even if vested with supreme power, shall or may make such responsible decisions without the Supreme Soviet's sanction."
The statistics showed that one out of every six who fell was an officer, and that overall about one of every six deaths was due to accidents such as vehicle mishaps, while more than 80 percent were combat losses.
The year-to-year death totals listed by Pravda were as follows: 86 in 1979; 1,484 in 1980; 1,298 in 1981; 1,948 in 1982; 1,446 in 1983; 2,343 in 1984; 1,868 in 1985; 1,333 in 1986; 1,215 in 1987; 759 in 1988; and 53 in 1989.
Publication of the yearly casualty figures represents another step in the government's effort to come clean about the nine-year war, which was virtually unreported in the news media for the first six years before Mikhail Gorbachev came to power.
It also was seen as an effort to reach out to the soldiers who fought in Afghanistan, many of whom have felt their efforts have been slighted in comparison with those of veterans of World War II, which in the Soviet Union is called "The Great Patriotic War."
"We all cherish the memory of the fallen sons of the motherland, and the one who tries to belittle or negate their feat does not deserve to call himself a patriot," it said.
Some of the most vivid Soviet reporting in the glasnost era has centered on the cases of bureaucratic indifference to disabled servicemen from the Afghan war concerning getting apartments and jobs.
"It is necessary to show every care and attention, as is being urged by the party, for all servicemen, disabled soldiers and their families and the families of those who perished.
"From now on, the same privileges and benefits intended for servicemen who performed their duty in the Republic of Afghanistan will apply to servicemen who took part in combat actions in Vietnam, Syria, Egypt and other countries."
Although the Krasnaya Zvezda, the Red Army newspaper, has published accounts of Soviet soldiers who manned anti-aircraft batteries in Vietnam, no newspaper has touched on combat actions in Egypt, Syria and other places.
Israeli planes dueled Soviet MiGs on several occasions around the time of the 1969-70 War of Attrition between Egypt and Israel.