Legacy Of The Russian Defeat

The Soviets retreated in 1989, leaving Afghanistan to a civil war that swept up the Soviet-constructed edifices in the conflagration. However improbably, a few of these are still inhabited, like an engineering school, the Auto Mechanic Institute, where a second-year student in a green T-shirt picked his way one recent afternoon from the ghostly wreckage of bombed-out classrooms.
Others are simply wrecks, prowled only by the homeless, drug addicts and dogs — sobering artifacts that confront the United States and its allies as they begin pondering what their own legacy might be.
"The Soviets came in believing they could re-engineer other people's societies, releasing Afghans from their medieval backwardness," said Sir Rodric Braithwaite, a former British ambassador to Moscow whose book "Afgantsy" is about the Soviet occupation. "They didn't transform Afghan society any more than we are going to."
In 1980s Kabul, the Soviet Embassy on Darulaman Road, bustling with technicians and ideologues, was the locus of power, just as the U.S. Embassy across town is today.
The current Russian ambassador, Andrey Avetisyan, 51, worked here as a young diplomat during the 1980s. He was here, too, when things became dicey in the early 1990s: He spent 16 days hiding in a bomb shelter as the mujahedeen divided up Kabul, and he was one of the last Russians to flee Afghanistan, in August 1992. Link.