These boys were heroes! They weren’t fighting for any so called ‘mistaken policy’. They fought because they put their faith in us. We should kneel before every one of them. If we truly faced up to the comparison of what we did here with what befell them there, we might go mad.
(A. Golubnichaya, construction engineer)
Today, of course, Afghanistan is a profitable and fashionable subject. That will no doubt please you, Comrade Alexievich, because your book will be all the rage. Nowadays in this country a lot of people are crawling out of the woodwork who are fascinated by any opportunity to smear the good name of their Motherland, including some Afgantsi. And it’s people like you who give them the ammunition they need to defend themselves with. ‘Look what we were forced to do,’ they say. Decent people don’t need to defend themselves — they stay decent whatever circumstances they find themselves in — and there are plenty of such veterans of Afghanistan, but they weren’t the ones you sought out.
Although I wasn’t in Afghanistan, I fought all through World War II and I know there was plenty of dirt in that war too; but I don’t intend to bring it all up and I won’t allow others to either. It’s not just that that war was different. We all know that we have to eat in order to live, and that eating also implies going to the toilet (if you’ll pardon the expression), but we just don’t mention such things.
So why couldn’t you and those like you observe the same taboo in your books about these wars? If Afgantsi themselves protest against the ‘revelations’ in books like yours we should respect their wishes. And I know what makes them object so violently: it’s a normal human emotion called shame. They’re ashamed. You picked up that emotion accurately enough, but you had to go further, and take it before the court of public opinion. In telling us that they shot camels and killed civilians you wanted to demonstrate the futility and wickedness of war, but you don’t realise that in doing so you insult those who took part in it, including a lot of innocent boys.
(N. Druzhinin, Tula)
Then there were the phone calls:
‘OK, we aren’t heroes, maybe, but now we’re murderers, according to you. We murdered women, children and their animals. Maybe in thirty years I’ll be ready to tell my son that not everything was as heroic as the books say it was. But I’ll tell him myself, in my own words and in thirty years’ time. Now it’s still an open wound which is only just beginning to heal and form a scab. Don’t pick it! Leave it alone! It’s still very painful.’
‘How could you? How dare you cover our boys’ graves with such dirt? They did their duty by the Motherland to the bitter end and now you want them to be forgotten …
‘Hundreds of little museums and memorial comers have been set up in schools all over the country. I took my son’s exercise books and his army overcoat to his old school to serve as an example.
‘Who needs your dreadful truth? I don’t want to know it!!! You want to buy your own glory at the expense of our sons’ blood. They were heroes, heroes, heroes! They should have beautiful books written about them, and you’re turning them into mincemeat.’
‘I had my son’s stone engraved with these words: “Remember, friends, he died that the living might live.” I know, now, that that was not true — he did not die for the sake of the living. I was lied to when I was young and continued the process with him. We were so good at believing. “Love the Motherland, son, she’ll never betray you and love you always.” I used to repeat to him. Now I would like to write something different on his grave: “Why?” ’ (A mother)
‘My neighbour brought me a newspaper with the excerpt from your book. “Forgive me,” she said, “but this is the war you told us about.” I couldn’t believe my eyes. I didn’t think it possible to write such things and have them printed. We’ve got so used to living on two levels, one according to what we read in books and the press, and the other — totally different — according to our own experience. It’s more shocking than comforting, when newspapers actually start to describe life as it really is. Everything you wrote is true, except that the reality was even more terrible. I would like to meet you and talk to you.’ (A woman)
‘I see my son leave the flat every morning but I still can’t believe he’s home. When he was over there I’d tell myself, if they send him back in a coffin I’ll do one of two things: go on a protest march or go to church. I was invited to his old school. “Come and tell us about your son and how he won the Red Star twice over,” they begged. But I didn’t go. I’m forty-five. I call ours the “obedient generation” and the Afghan war the acme of our tragedy. You’ve hit a nerve by daring to ask us and our children this question: “Who are we? And why can they do what they want with us?’” (A mother)
‘ “Oh, they’re dreadful people!” I heard someone say at work, talking about the Afgantsi. But so are we all. The war didn’t make them any worse than they were before. In fact I sometimes think the war must have been a cleaner experience for them than our day-to-day life was for us here at home. That is why they long to go back.’ (A woman)
‘How much longer are you going to go on describing us as mentally ill, or rapists, or junkies? We were told the opposite over there. “When you get home you’ll be in the vanguard of perestroika. You’ll clean up the whole stagnant mess!” they said. We thought we’d be restoring order to society but they won’t let us get on with the job. “Study!” they keep telling us. “Settle down and have a family!”
‘It was quite a shock for me, the black marketeers, the mafia and the apathy — but they won’t let us get on and do something serious about it. I felt utterly bewildered until some clever guy said to me, “What can you actually do, apart from shooting? Do you really think that justice comes out of the barrel of a gun?” That was when I began to think, to hell with my gun. I’ll have to stop thinking it’s still hanging over my shoulder, I told myself.’
‘I cried when I read your article, but I shan’t read the whole book, because of an elementary sense of self-preservation. I’m not sure whether we ought to know so much about ourselves. Perhaps it’s just too frightening. It leaves a great void in my soul. You begin to lose faith in your fellow-man and fear him instead.’ (A woman)
‘Now you just listen to me! I’m fed up with the whole damn thing! Why is it that whenever you write about girls who went to Afghanistan you always make us out to be prostitutes? I don’t deny that some of them were, but not all. It makes me want to scream! Why should we all be tarred with the same brush? Take the trouble to look inside us and you’ll find some very tormented souls.
‘For a year and a half after I got home I couldn’t sleep at night; if I did doze off my dreams were full of bodies and shelling, and I woke up in a panic. I went to see a psychiatrist, not to ask for sick leave, just for some tablets or even a bit of advice. His response was, “Did you really see a lot of corpses?” God, I wanted to slap his silly young face! I haven’t bothered with any more doctors.
‘This feeling that I don’t want to go on living gets stronger with every passing day. I have no desire to meet anyone or see anything but because of our wretched housing shortage there’s nowhere to escape to. I don’t want or need anything for myself, but do try to do something for the ones asking for your help.
‘The same thing’s happening to all the people I’ve kept in touch with from my time over there. All the same, I don’t trust what you’re saying. You’re trying to convince us that we were cruel — but do you realise how cruel you yourself, and your society, have been?
‘I won’t mention my name. Take it that I’m already dead.’
‘You want me to accept that it was a sick generation that came back from the war, but I prefer to see it as the generation whose eyes were opened. At least we found out who our real friends were. Yes, of course young boys were killed, but who knows how many of them might have died in drunken brawls and knife-fights anyway? I read somewhere (I can’t remember the exact statistics) that more people die in car accidents every year in this country than we
re killed in ten years of war. The army hadn’t had a real war to fight for a long time and this was a chance to test ourselves and our latest weapons. Those boys were heroes, every one of them, but it’s because of people like you that we’re now in retreat on all fronts. We’ve lost Poland, Germany, Czechoslovakia. What’s happened to our Empire? Is this what I fought all through the war for, right up to Berlin in 1945?’
‘We want justice for ourselves. Just recently I’ve begun to wonder how we’ve developed this acute sense of justice after coming back from a war where there was none. Don’t mention my surname if you print this — I don’t want any funny looks from the people round me.’
‘Why all this talk of mistakes? And do you really think all these exposes and revelations in the press are a help? You’re depriving our youth of their heroic heritage. People are killed out there and you go on talking about mistakes. I suppose the real heroes aren’t the boys being pushed around in wheelchairs by their mothers or wearing artificial legs under their jeans, but the ones who broke their legs in motorbike crashes so as not to go into the army, or deserted to the enemy?’
‘I was on holiday by the Black Sea and saw a few young lads crawling over the sand to get to the water. I didn’t go to the beach any more, I’d just have started crying. They were laughing and trying to flirt with us girls but we all ran away from them. Yes, I did, too. I want those boys to be happy, to know that we value them even the way they are. They want to live! I love them because they’re alive!’
‘My only son was killed there. The only comfort I had was that I’d raised a hero, but according to you he wasn’t a hero at all, but a murderer and aggressor. Then how would you describe our sons’ courage? They shot themselves when they were fatally wounded rather than surrender and dishonour themselves as Soviet soldiers, and threw themselves on grenades to save their comrades’ lives. Do you think that was all a gigantic lie?
‘Why? Why do you continually pick up what is black in man, rather than what is fine and noble? Remember Gorky’s phrase: “Man — the very word is proud!’” (A father)
Of course there were criminals, addicts and thugs. Where aren’t there? Those who fought in Afghanistan must, absolutely, must be seen as victims who need psychological rehabilitation.
‘Somewhere I read the confession of an American Vietnam veteran. He said a terrible thing. “In the eight years since the war the number of suicides — officers as well as other ranks — is about the same as the number of fatalities in the war itself.” We must urgently consider the souls of our Afgantsi.’
‘They say up to a million “enemy” lives were lost fighting for their own interests and their own freedom. However heroically the aggressors may themselves have died, that onslaught on basic human rights was no act of heroism, even though we try and dress it up as such today. The most important question is this: in whose name was all this done? There’s been enough hero-worship now, Afgantsi. We sympathise with you. That’s the paradox! We know that oppressed and demoralised young men were forced to take part in the war, but the fact remains that, even while you yourselves were dying, you were bringing death and destruction to another people. That was a crime rather than heroism. Only repentance can bring relief to you who partook in a shameful episode.
‘Please publish my opinion, I’m curious to know what dirt these “heroes of our time” will throw at me.’
‘I don’t know what my son did in Afghanistan. Why was he there? We began asking such questions even while the war was still on, and I almost got thrown out of the Party for it. And I would have been, but for the fact that my son was brought home in a zinc coffin. I couldn’t even give him a Christian funeral.’ (A father)
‘This is still a very painful memory. We were in a train, and a woman in our compartment told us she was the mother of an officer killed in Afghanistan. I understood — she was the mother, she was crying, but I told her, “Your son died in an unjust war. The mujahedin were defending their homeland.’”
‘They took young kids to fight and destroyed them … and for what? To defend the Motherland and our southern borders?
‘They rehoused me after, but I sit here alone, crying. Three years later I go to the cemetery every day, and imagine the weddings and grandchildren that will never be.
‘They phoned me from HQ. “Come, Mamasha,” — that’s what they called me — “come and receive the medal on your son’s behalf.” They presented me with his Red Star. “Say a few words, Mamasha,’ they asked. So I did. I held up the medal. “Look!” I said. “This is my son’s blood.” ’
‘It won’t be long before they call on us to put the country to rights and give us the weapons to do it with. I think there’s going to have to be a reckoning pretty soon. Just publish their names! Don’t let them hide behind pseudonyms.’
‘Some people are stupid enough to blame those eighteen-yearold boys for everything and it’s your book that is responsible for that. We must distinguish the war from those who took part in it. The war was criminal and has been condemned as such, but the boys must be defended and protected.’
‘I’m a Russian literature teacher. For many years I taught my pupils some words of Karl Marx: “The death of a hero is not like that of the frog in the fable, who inflated himself until he burst. It resembles, rather, the setting of the sun.” What does your book have to teach us?’
‘They want to transform us from a lost generation into reliable defenders of the status quo (we’ve already proved our faith in it, after all). Nowadays they’re sending us to Chernobyl, Tbilisi or Baku, wherever there’s danger.’
‘I don’t want to have children, I’m frightened of what they might say about me and about the war when they grow up. Because I was there. It was a filthy war and we should admit that it was so. But because we stay silent our children will have to do it for us.
‘I’m ashamed to admit this but when I got back I was sorry I didn’t win a medal, not even a minor one. Now I’m glad I didn’t kill anyone.’
‘We are forced to suppress so much of ourselves in this country, and we know so little about ourselves. How much do we know, for example, about the cruelty of our own teenagers? There’s so little written about this question and hardly any research done. Until very recently, of course, there was no call for it — weren’t our Soviet teenagers the finest in the world? Just as we had no drug addicts, rapists or robbers! Well, it turned out we have more than our fair share of all of them. Then these adolescent boys were handed out guns and had a simple message hammered into them: “All mujahedin are bandits and all bandits are mujahedin!” Now they come home and tell us all about how they lobbed grenades into villages. For them this is the norm. “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do … ’”
Arthur Koestier asked this question: ‘Why, when we tell the truth, does it always sound like a lie? Why, when we proclaim the New Age, do we cover the ground with corpses? And why do we accompany our paeans to the glorious future of socialism with threats?’
In shelling those quiet little villages and bombing the ancient mountain-paths we were shelling and bombing our own ideals. This cruel truth is something we must face up to and survive. Our children are already playing games called ‘Mujahedin’ and ‘Limited Contingent’ [as the first Soviet forces were euphemistically described].
It will take great courage to recognise the truth about ourselves. I know — I’ve tried it. I still remember the way a twenty-year-old shouted, ‘I don’t want to hear about any political mistakes! I just don’t want to! Give me my two legs back if it was all a mistake.’ And I also remember what the boy in the next bed said: ‘They put the blame on a few men who were already dead.† And everyone else was innocent — apart from us! Yes, we used our weapons to kill. That’s what you handed them out for. Did you expect us to come home angels?’
There are only two ways forward from all this: to become aware of the truth, or to shield ourselves from it. Are we to hide ourselves away yet again?
In The Bl
ack Obelisk Erich Maria Remarque wrote:
‘Shortly after the truce was called a strange process began to occur, and it continues to this day. The war, which until 1918 had been hated almost without exception by the soldiers involved, was gradually transformed into the great event of their lives. They returned to an everyday existence which had seemed, as they lay in the trenches and cursed the war, a kind of paradise. Now, faced with the frustrations and problems of ordinary life, they recalled the war as a vague memory of another time and another place; and quite against their wishes and even without their active participation, it took on a different aspect, like a retouched painting. The mass slaughter was seen as an adventure from which they had fortunately emerged unharmed. Suffering was forgotten, grief assuaged; and death, which had spared us, became what it always does become for the living, something abstract, even unreal, which takes on reality only when it strikes the man next to us or threatens us directly. In 1918 the Veterans’ Society was intensely pacifist; now it has taken on a sharply nationalistic character. Memories of the war, and the sense of soldierly comradeship so strongly alive in nearly all the members, have been cunningly transformed by Volkenstein into pride in the war itself. Those who lack this nationalist fervour are held to besmirch the memory of those cruelly betrayed heroes who wanted so passionately to live.’
I must admit I’m bewildered when I see those young men putting on their Afgantsi uniforms, pinning their medals to their chests, and going off to schools to talk to the children. I can’t understand how a mother can be forced to give ten or twenty speeches about her dead son, to the point where she’s almost too exhausted to drag herself home.
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