Afgantsy
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– SEVEN –
The Nationbuilders
Even before the troops had crossed the Amu Darya, an army of Soviet advisers had preceded them to try to build ‘socialism’ there, as other foreigners were later to try to build ‘democracy’.
The United States, the Soviet Union, Germany and others all gave aid to Afghanistan before the war. The Russians had the advantage of a direct model on which to base themselves: the Central Asian republics of the Soviet Union, to which in the course of a hundred years of imperial rule they had brought law and order, clean water, health care, universal education for boys and girls, economic development, and for the elite the prospect of glittering prizes in Moscow. This progress was achieved at a very high price: a protracted guerrilla war in the 1920s, perhaps a million dead in the collectivisation of Kazakhstan in the 1930s, widespread corruption, and political repression sometimes even more ruthless than elsewhere in the Soviet Union. Nevertheless one American scholar judged in 1982: ‘The Soviet leadership can legitimately claim to have a developmental model that has managed to achieve one of the highest rates of literacy, the best health care system, and the highest general standard of living found anywhere in the Muslim world.’1 Even though the extreme measures of the 1920s and 1930s could no longer be applied, there seemed few intrinsic reasons why what had worked in Central Asia should not work in Afghanistan too.
Aid Projects
According to Soviet figures, which are neither systematic nor coherent, Soviet aid to Afghanistan between 1954 and 1980 amounted to 1.5 billion roubles. The Russians built power stations, irrigation systems, factories, natural gas wells, and the silo which remained long after the war as one of the sights of Kabul. Many of these were operated with the assistance of Soviet specialists. In addition to army and air-force officers, the Soviets trained labourers, technicians, and engineers—over seventy thousand by 1980, according to Soviet government figures. In 1979 and 1980 the Russians provided 500 million roubles of economic aid to the Afghans: credits, grants, vehicles, fuel, and support for agriculture. In February 1987 they provided 950 million roubles in grant aid, to sweeten the prospect of their eventual withdrawal. Aid to Afghanistan constituted a significant, though not overwhelming, portion of the Soviet aid given to the Third World at this time—estimated at $78 billion between 1982 and 1986. Taken together, aid to the Afghan military and the expenses associated with the Soviet military effort amounted to 1,578.5 million roubles in 1984, 2,623.8 in 1985, 3,197.4 in 1986, and 4,116 in 1987, or roughly $7.5 billion over the four years. By comparison, the entire Soviet military budget as late as 1989 was $128 billion. Similarly, according to Russian government records, Afghanistan’s debt to the USSR by October 1991 was 4.7 billion roubles, roughly half of India’s, and about a tenth of the total debt owed to the Soviet Union by all developing countries.2
Once the war started the Russians made every effort to keep existing projects going, often at considerable risk to the Soviet specialists involved. The major irrigation project outside Jalalabad employed about six thousand people, and consisted of six large state farms, specialising in the production of citrus fruit, vegetable oils, dairy products, and meat. It included a dam and a major canal, a hydroelectric station and a pumping station, a repair works, a wood processing plant, and a jam factory. It was the largest economic project in the country, and was said to be larger than any comparable project anywhere else in the developing world. But it was in a vulnerable place: one hour’s drive from Pakistan, close to two Russian brigades and an airbase. The farms came under attack from the mujahedin, who mined the local roads. B. N. Mikhanov, the chief expert, and his colleagues—there were seventy-eight of them altogether—were professionals, mostly middle-aged and married. They were regularly threatened, and their Afghan fellow workers were sometimes abducted and killed. But they stayed at their posts, and went to work carrying an automatic, a bag of spare ammunition, and hand grenades to defend themselves if necessary. The project survived until after the Russians left, when it was destroyed by the mujahedin in their failed offensive against Jalalabad in the spring of 1989.3
Another major project was the Polytechnic Institute in Kabul, which had been completed well before the war began. Alexander Lunin was the chief adviser to the rector, and managed the Soviet teaching staff—more than a hundred of them. In addition to its three faculties—construction, geology, and electro-mechanics—the institute had a preparatory department which took in students from poorer families and brought them up to speed in Russian and other subjects. The institute too kept going, despite the threats, the shelling, the booby traps, and the death of colleagues.4
How much lasting good all this money did for the Afghan people is not clear. Before the Afghan Communists came to power, Soviet aid was given more or less on its merits. But thereafter it was distorted by the ideologically driven and ultimately futile attempt to build ‘socialism’.5 From the start, many programmes were ill-conceived for local conditions. Many more were ruined in thirty years of fighting. Aid supplies were diverted for private profit or hijacked by the mujahedin.
And all this effort brought the Russians few of the political dividends for which they had hoped. They had almost no influence on the events that led to the murder of Taraki by Amin. They got a closer grip on Amin’s successor, Babrak Karmal. But this brought its own problems. The plethora of Soviet advisers, their micromanagement of everyday business, robbed their Afghan opposite numbers of any sense of responsibility and initiative. Why take risks, if the Soviet comrades were willing to take the risks for you? Faced with interference at all levels in the military as well as the civilian bureaucracy, the Afghans often simply shrugged their shoulders and let the Russians take the strain. Najibullah, who was President of Afghanistan after 1986, described a typical meeting of the Afghan council of ministers: ‘We sit down at the table. Each minister comes with his own [Soviet] adviser. The meeting begins, the discussion becomes heated, and gradually the advisers come closer and closer to the table, so accordingly our people move away, and eventually only the advisers are left at the table.’6
The Advisers
Many of the Soviet advisers genuinely believed in their mission to help the local people and were wholeheartedly enthusiastic about it. The youth adviser and journalist Vladimir Snegirev exulted on his arrival, ‘It may be that we have had the good fortune to witness one of the most brilliant and tragic revolutions of the end of the century.’ He was present in March 1982 at the celebrations for the Afghan New Year in the Kabul stadium. ‘There is a striking contrast,’ he noted, ‘which is only possible here: many of the women on the terraces conceal their faces under the chador—a primitive, medieval superstition; but parachutists are landing in the stadium and they are women too, who grew up in this country. The chador and the parachute. You don’t have to be a prophet to foretell the victory of the parachute.’
For the next months and years Snegirev and many others like him found themselves wrestling with the problem of why this essentially democratic and well-intentioned revolution was so bitterly opposed by so many of the Afghan people. More than twenty years later—after the Afghan civil war, the reign of the Taliban, and the American invasion—Snegirev ruefully recognised how naive he had been: he himself had been living in a decaying Orwellian regime without a future. ‘But the dreams remained: ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Social justice. Down with the oppressors of the working class!’… After all, our own country was huge, and still seemed powerful. Yes, everyone was equally poor, but there was no terrible poverty, and there was a giant industry, canals, hydroelectric stations. Were it not for our sclerotic leadership, people like Brezhnev, everything would work out differently. That’s what I thought, that’s what many people my age thought. When we arrived in Afghanistan, even before we had had time to look round, we began to do what we had prepared ourselves to do for the whole of our previous lives… [H]ere [in Afghanistan] it was as if time had gone backwards… But now a power had arisen in this land which
wanted to drag the people from out of their superstition, to give children the chance to go to school, peasants the possibility to plough their fields with tractors instead of oxen, women the opportunity to see the world directly, instead of through the eye slits of the chador. Was that not a revolution? The battle of the future against a past already condemned? And I was part of it.’7
The number of advisers and aid workers increased throughout the summer of 1979—Party advisers, military advisers, technical advisers, advisers on youth affairs from the Komsomol, trade union advisers despite the absence of an Afghan working class, advisers from the Soviet Ministry of Shipping even though the rivers in Afghanistan were barely navigable.8 There were advisers in all the ministries, in the factories, in the transport companies, banks, and educational institutions. The number of advisers in the Foreign and Internal Affairs ministries probably ran into the hundreds.9 Before the war began Soviet experts in Afghanistan were not well paid, even by comparison with experts from other Socialist countries, who might get as much as $1,000 a month. But after the invasion their pay went up, to about $700 a month, significantly more than they would have received back home. The bonus was known, with grim humour, as ‘coffin money’.10
Many of the people who went were well-qualified specialists. Others were enthusiastic amateurs. Many came voluntarily, because they were idealists, or because they wanted adventure, or because that was the only way they could get abroad, or because they thought they could better themselves. Of course, many other people who ended up as advisers in Afghanistan, perhaps the majority, had little choice in the matter. The military and Party political specialists were simply ordered to go. Others were invited to volunteer, which most of them did more or less willingly: it would have been a bad career move to refuse.
There were some sixteen to eighteen hundred Soviet military advisers in Afghanistan by the end of 1980. Sixty to eighty of them were generals. There were three or four officers attached to each Afghan army battalion, four or five in each regiment, eleven or twelve in each division, with interpreters to match.11 They wore Afghan army uniform and were better paid than officers in the 40th Army. Advisers could put together the money for a car in one year, and for the down payment on a cooperative apartment back home in two, something that would take very much longer for an officer on Soviet pay scales. Not surprisingly the regular Soviet military hated the military advisers—the word was not exaggerated, according to Valeri Shiryaev, who served as a military interpreter with an Afghan division. Some Soviet units had notices on the entrance to their bases: ‘No dogs or advisers admitted’.
The attitude of the regular officers changed when it became clear that working with the Afghan army could be very dangerous. Two generals died in action: General Vlasov, and Lieutenant General Shkidchenko, whose helicopter went down while he was directing an Afghan army operation in Khost in January 1982. One in three of the advisers serving in Shiryaev’s division died in 1983–4. Even so, there were cases when Soviet units refused to make space on their helicopters for the evacuation of wounded advisers, saying that since they worked for the Afghans, it was for the Afghans to evacuate them.12
The Party advisers were the most numerous among the civilians. In 1983 the Central Committee of the PDPA had eighty Soviet advisers supported by fifty interpreters. They were intimately involved in the workings of party and government, often writing speeches for senior Afghans, which were then translated into Pushtu or Dari for the politicians to read out.13 These people had no specialised training for their mission beyond a one-week induction course. It seems to have been assumed that the ideological orthodoxies that were supposed to work in the Soviet Union would work just as well in Afghanistan. In practice they worked just as badly, or even worse. Many Party advisers were of poor calibre, especially in the early years, when Afghanistan was regarded as a convenient dumping place for people who were not making the grade back in the Soviet Union. With some honourable exceptions very few of them had any knowledge or understanding of the country and simply attempted to apply to Afghanistan the tired political and organisational formulas which were already failing in the Soviet Union.
The idea of sending Soviet youth advisers to Afghanistan was mooted soon after the April 1978 coup. Between May 1979 and November 1988 about a hundred and fifty officials from the Young Communist League of the Soviet Union, the Komsomol, served in Afghanistan as advisers. Their task was to set up a youth movement in the kishlaks as well as in the towns.14 All were volunteers, at least in principle. They were recruited from all over the Soviet Union. They would get a phone call from out of the blue: ‘It’s been suggested that you be recommended for a trip “across the river”’ (the accepted euphemism),15 to work with the Democratic Organisation of the Youth of Afghanistan (DOMA). They would get a six-week crash course in the history, culture, traditions, and languages of Afghanistan. They would then be sent off, initially to Kabul.
The Komsomol advisers were organised into teams to work with children and adolescents, on ideological and international affairs, on publishing, and in the provinces. But initially they concentrated on providing the DOMA with all the proper trappings: a Central Committee, a Secretariat, and departments for organisation, political work with the masses, military-patriotic affairs, work with the ‘young pioneers’, international affairs, financial, and general administrative affairs. They set up committees in the provinces and opened the Central Palace of the Pioneers in 1981 in the presence of Karmal’s partner Anakhita Ratebzad. They distributed ten thousand translations of Nikolai Ostrovski’s Socialist realist classic about Stalin’s first Five Year Plan, How The Steel Was Tempered, no doubt to the complete mystification of the lucky recipients. By the time the youth advisers were withdrawn at the end of 1988, they claimed that the DOMA had 220,000 members—a figure padded, a sceptic might think, by some serious double counting.
Nikolai Zakharov was one of the first to arrive. He landed at Kabul airport in the middle of a firefight and whatever illusions he may have had about his mission were soon dispelled. It was quite clear that his new Afghan colleagues were determined to work in their own way. He noted in his diary that Abdurrahman, a deputy leader of the DOMA, said after a drink too many, ‘In order to achieve total victory we will permit no internal attempts at opposition, even if we have to wade through blood.’16 The young people the DOMA was working with were unpromising material, heavily influenced by Islamic, Maoist, and nationalistic thinking. The advisers did not have the finance to carry through their ideas. Neither the Afghan authorities not the people back in the Soviet Union took much notice of their recommendations. Methods which might have worked in the Soviet Union were quite inappropriate in Afghanistan. As early as December 1981 one adviser ruefully recognised, ‘Copying the Komsomol system of personnel management takes no account of the real circumstances. Even though an instruction has been issued to that effect, there is no unified system of personnel in the country, and one reason for that is that it is not viable.’17 Not surprisingly, most of their efforts were in vain.
Of course, most of the advisers needed interpreters. Some were recruited from Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, where the people spoke languages similar to those in Afghanistan. Others came from the elite academic institutions of Moscow and Leningrad, where the study of Afghanistan, its history, its peoples, its languages, and its culture, could stand comparison with any in the world.
In June 1979 Yevgeni Kiselev was preparing for his final exams in the Oriental Department of Moscow State University. Soviet Union students were normally posted on graduation to jobs picked for them by the authorities. Kiselev was expecting to work for the news agency TASS in Kabul. Instead he was summoned out of the blue to a meeting in the Dean’s office. Here he and a couple of other fellow students met two men in civilian clothes who told them that all postings had been cancelled. All that year’s graduates in Persian and Pushtu were being sent to Afghanistan as interpreters. They were then interviewed by two colonels—polished, refined, polite,
typical staff officers—who reminded them that as students they were liable to military service. They were therefore being taken into the army. On 12 July they were flown to Kabul and assigned to Afghan units to work alongside the Soviet military advisers. They wore Afghan military uniform and, like the advisers, were paid more than Soviet officers of the equivalent rank. Kiselev and five others were put to live in a three-bedroomed flat in a new microrayon which was barely finished and was still inadequately equipped. The rooms in the apartments had cement floors, and there were no mattresses, pillows, or sheets on the metal bed frames. Kiselev managed to track down some blankets and mattresses in the town. He and his colleagues had to improvise their own furniture.18
Another new arrival was Andrei Greshnov. He hoped to complete his studies in Kabul, but he had not yet passed the exam on the History of the Communist Party, an essential qualification for any foreign trip. He just scraped through, and was sent on his way after a short course at the Institute of African and Asian Studies on how to comport himself as a Soviet citizen abroad. But instead of continuing his studies as he had hoped, he was brutally told that he was going to be an interpreter with the Afghan army. If he refused, he would be excluded from the university. Two weeks later, without having taken his final exams, he too was on the aeroplane to Kabul. He discovered as soon as he landed that the Farsi he had learned at university had little in common with the Dari spoken on the Kabul streets: he could not understand what the airport workers were saying. He was assigned to the same apartment as Kiselev.19