Микросообщество и устная история

Micro-Communities and Oral History: Transcarpathian Hungarian Veterans of the Soviet Union’s War in Afghanistan (The Background and Results of an Oral History Project) 30 years ago, the withdrawal of the Soviet forces from Afghanistan officially concluded the last armed conflict of the Soviet Union, which had begun in 1979 and since then has often been compared to the United States’ war in Vietnam.In total more than 14,000 soviet soldiers died or went missing in the Afghan War. The 18-19-year-old young men conscripted into the Soviet Army (about 150 soldiers of Hungarian nationality from Zakarpattia among them), who spent the most of their military service in Afghanistan, were mentally unprepared for this new type of warfare, which significantly differed from the Great Patriotic War they had learned about in school.This study briefly presents the methodology, limitations,and difficulties, as well as the participants, background, timeline,objectives,and resultsof anoral history research project conducted by a group of Hungarian students and researchers from ELTE between 2010 and 2013in Zakarpattia Oblast, Ukraine.