Born Then1979–1989
Life during the Soviet–Afghan War
Be born in a place it hit, a few years before it began, and see what it did to five ordinary lives.
What it meant for ordinary people
The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979 to prop up a communist government, and fought mujahideen rebels backed by the US, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia for a decade. About five to six million Afghans fled abroad, the world's largest refugee population at the time.
Deaths: about 500,000 to 2 million Afghans, and about 15,000 Soviet soldiers.
How hard it hits each person in the game (risk of death, of being conscripted, of leaving) comes from scholarly estimates.
Around the same time
- Great Migration of Black Americans 1916–1970
- Bracero program and Mexican migration to the United States 1942–2007
- Apartheid 1948–1994
- Division of Germany 1949–1990
- Italian economic miracle and the move north 1950–1970
- Egyptian revolution of 1952 and land reform 1952–1961
- Mau Mau uprising and the Kenya Emergency 1952–1960
- Algerian War and French conscription 1954–1962
- Japanese postwar economic boom 1955–1973
- Vietnam War 1955–1975
- Great Leap Forward famine 1959–1961
- Turkish labour migration to West Germany 1961–1973
- Korean economic miracle 1962–1996
- Vietnam War and the American draft 1964–1973
- Brazilian military dictatorship 1964–1985
- Colombian armed conflict 1964–2016
- Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66 1965–1966
- Cultural Revolution 1966–1976
- Green Revolution in India 1966–1985
- Nigerian Civil War (Biafra) 1967–1970
- Egypt's wars with Israel (1967–1973) 1967–1973
- Ujamaa villagization in Tanzania 1967–1977
- 1970 Bhola cyclone 1970
- Bangladesh Liberation War 1971
- Martial law under Marcos 1972–1986
- Migration to the Gulf 1973–2025
- Cambodian genocide 1975–1979
- The Emergency in India 1975–1977
- Dirty War in Argentina 1976–1983
- Iranian Revolution 1978–1982