The Tankies' Tankies/ 2
The PDPA worked essentially amongst officers who had trained in the USSR or had become impressed with the USSR as a model of how a backward country could be developed, and wanted to try Stalinist methods. Neither PDPA, as such, nor the PDPA officers, related to the rank and file other than through the normal military hierarchy. The idea that the PDP's relationship to the army amounted to a class alliance of workers and peasants is sheer fantasy. At every point it is contradicted by the facts - and by the course of events after April 1978. If the PDPA really had won over a sizeable section of...