The Road to Afghanistan - George Washington University

The authors of this classified memorandum did not neglect to note the delicate issueof Taraki’s and Amin’s requests for support in their campaign for the “Great Pashtunistan.”“Afghan leaders expressed their concern regarding anti-Afghan activities based onthe territory of Pakistan, and they emphasized disagreements with Pakistan concerning theissue of Pashtuns and Baluchi,” read the classified Central Committee memorandum. “Ourside tactfully expressed the undesirability of employing any extreme measures that couldbe taken advantage of by the external and domestic enemies of Afghanistan.”***One evening, Starostin was told that Nikolai Alexandrovich Dvoryankov, a professorof Moscow State University, would arrive on an Aeroflot flight in Kabul the following day.Valery knew that he had to put everything aside to greet the scholar.Dvoryankov visited Afghanistan regularly in the sixties and seventies. He was aleading specialist of Pashto and the history of Afghanistan who was known for deliveringbrilliant presentations at scholarly conferences in Kabul. During his visits, NikolaiAlexandrovich eagerly gave interviews on Afghan Radio. Those interviews were alwayswell-received, and stirred the minds of Afghan intellectuals. One of the reasons was thatthey had difficulty understanding how a foreigner could speak so eloquently in theirlanguage. Not only could he speak Pashto, but he wrote poetry and translated Pushkin andMayakovski from Russian into Pashto.Dvoryankov was an old friend of Taraki’s. When they first met, Taraki was known inAfghanistan as a would-be writer, an author of sentimental stories detailing the difficultiesof life among the poor in Afghanistan.267