The World - News from Sept. 20, 1989

The Soviet Union’s highest-ranking officer in Afghanistan opposed the Kremlin’s decision to send Soviet troops into that country in 1979--and lost his job because of it, the Moscow weekly Literary Gazette reported. In an interview, Gen. Ivan G. Pavlovsky, now 80, said he proposed that the Communist Party Politburo send a representative to Kabul to express then-Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev’s fears that Afghan leader Hafizullah Amin would turn toward the United States. But Pavlovsky, commander of Soviet advisers in Afghanistan, was overruled by Brezhnev with the unanimous backing of the Politburo, the weekly said, and was brought home and stripped of his Defense Ministry posts.