I'm going to be. Hello and welcome to we have another episode of Lions on the Donkeys.

Joe with me is Nick. Unpredictable.

And we are at part six of the Soviet Afghan war.

That's crazy.

We're almost to the end, I promise.

Almost. Home stretch. So we left you last week. The Soviet

Union was looking for a way out of Afghanistan and the only way they found was to prop up

the teetering Afghan government, now being led by the bloodthirsty

Mohammed-Najibola.

1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became leader of the Soviet Union and he had a ton of reforms in mind that he worried

simply would not work if Soviet soldiers were still trapped in Afghanistan.

For instance, Gorbachev allowed a certain amount of freedom of the press as any as most people have heard before this there

absolutely was no free press in the Soviet Union he was looking to change that and

that would have some pretty serious backlash.

I mean that's pretty dope.

There was a magazine called Ogonyuck,

probably butchering that, but it's something of like a Soviet version of Life magazine.

Oh, okay.

Um, began publishing terrifying firsthand accounts of soldiers lives in Afghanistan

as well as showing regular citizens for the first time,

the horrible conditions that their loved ones are forced to live in, thousands of miles away from home.

He allowed that? It was part of his reforms. That's actually kind of cool. I mean

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