General Boris Gromov walked across the Friendship Bridge into Uzbekistan, marking the formal end of the Soviet Union's nine-year military intervention in Afghanistan. The war had killed some 15,000 Soviet soldiers and over a million Afghans, drained the Soviet economy, and is widely seen as a critical factor in the collapse of the USSR just two years later.
On February 15, 1989, Lieutenant-General Boris Gromov became, according to official Soviet accounts, the last Soviet soldier to walk out of Afghanistan, crossing the Amu Darya river via the Friendship Bridge into what was then Soviet Uzbekistan. It was the anticlimactic end of a war that had begun with a confident Christmas Eve invasion in 1979.
The Soviet Union had sent in troops to prop up a communist government facing a growing insurgency, expecting a swift pacification. Instead, they found themselves fighting a grinding, decade-long counter-insurgency against U.S.-and-Pakistan-backed mujahideen fighters scattered across brutal mountain terrain, in a conflict that came to be called the Soviets' 'Vietnam.'
Roughly 15,000 Soviet soldiers died, alongside estimates of over a million Afghan civilians and combatants. The financial and political costs, combined with the war's deep unpopularity at home, badly weakened the Soviet state under Mikhail Gorbachev, contributing to the wave of reform and eventual collapse that swept the USSR by 1991. Afghanistan itself descended into further civil war, setting conditions for the Taliban's eventual rise in the 1990s.