The Soviet cultural center once symbolized Moscow’s bid for power in Afghanistan. Russia rebuilt the facility for a new era of influence.
An art exhibition of the work of Kabul University students inside one of the conference rooms of the Russian Center for Science and Culture in Kabul. By Amie Ferris-Rotman Amie Ferris-Rotman Moscow reporter for the Washington Post. Email Bio Follow April 15 at 6:00 AM KABUL — The Kremlin has opened a flashy new cultural hub in the Afghan capital. Again.
Yet Moscow also keeps some ingrained caution about all things Afghan. The Russian complex opened quietly, without ceremony and with no advertising apart from its unassuming Russian-language website. Many in Kabul believe the large, green reflective windowed structure is still under construction.The center has hosted films, concerts, fashion shows and a stream of visiting Russian lawmakers and Muslim Russian leaders.
At any one time, 6,500 Afghans are studying Russian across Afghanistan, and the center helps manage their hopes for a free-ride scholarship to a Russian university. Veterans from Moscow’s decade-long war in Afghanistan are also frequent guests, occasionally facing their erstwhile opponents on the soccer pitch.
Architecturally, the new center is a whisper of its former Soviet self. The former brutalist hulk stuck out like a sore thumb in the Kabul vista, becoming for many Afghans a stark symbol of stymied imperial ambition long after the Red Army’s 1989 withdrawal. “These are the two main presidents of the world,” Nekrasov said. “Only they can bring peace to Afghanistan.”
That 1980s war claimed the lives of at least 1 million Afghans and 15,000 Red Army soldiers, drowned Moscow’s coffers and hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Shortly afterward, the Afghan Communist government was overthrown and the country became engulfed in a brutal civil war, paving the way for the rise of the Taliban.
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