Afgantsy
Page 18
The Women
Women went to Afghanistan during the war for various reasons. If they were in the military they were simply posted, whether they liked it or not. By the 1980s women made up just over 1.5 per cent of the total numbers in the Soviet armed forces.20 Unlike the women who fought in the Second World War as bomber and fighter crews, as tank commanders, as snipers, these women served on the headquarters staff as archivists, cipher clerks, and interpreters, at the logistics base in Pul-i Khumri and in Kabul, or in the military hospitals and front-line medical units as doctors and nurses. Female civilian contract workers began to arrive in 1984 and worked in offices, in regimental libraries, as secretaries, in military stores and laundries, in Voentorg (the network of military shops). The commander of the 66th Independent Motor-rifle Brigade in Jalalabad even managed to get hold of a typist who could double up as a hairdresser.21
The volunteers had mixed motives. Doctors and nurses went to work in the military hospitals and forward medical stations out of a sense of professional commitment and duty. Some tended the wounded under fire, as their predecessors had done in the Second World War, and dealt with the most horrible wounds within days of arriving in Afghanistan.22 Some went for personal reasons: because their private lives had failed or because they badly needed the extra money. In Afghanistan they were fed regularly and for nothing, and they received a double salary.23 Some went out of a spirit of adventure: service as a civilian employee with Soviet forces abroad was one of the few ways a single woman with no connections could travel. Unlike the women in the military, the civilians could always break their contracts if they did not like what they found in Afghanistan: within a week they could be back in the Soviet Union.
Lena Maltseva went from a genuine sense of idealism and adventure, to make her own contribution to the help her country was giving the Afghan people. She was nineteen, a student at the Medical Institute in Taganrog. In 1983 she wrote to Komsomolskaya Pravda that the girls at her school as well as the boys wanted to test themselves, to harden themselves. ‘And what’s more, we all wanted to prepare ourselves to defend the Motherland—I’m sorry for the bombastic language, but I can’t express it in any other way… Why do I want to go now? Well, it may sound stupid, but I’m afraid I won’t get [to Afghanistan] in time. It’s now so difficult there, with an undeclared war in progress. What’s more, one day I will be a teacher. But honestly, I’m not yet ready for that. One can only teach when one has had some experience of life… Surely I could be useful there? (Bombast again, but what else can I say?) I want to help the people of that country, and our Soviet people who are already there.’24
The female volunteers, like the conscripts, were processed through their local Voenkomat. Many hoped to go to Germany, but there were few vacancies there and the officers in the Voenkomats needed to make up the quota for Afghanistan. So they persuaded or bullied the women to go there instead.
Though the women did not fight, they did from time to time come under fire. Forty-eight civilian employees and four praporshchiki died during the war, some as a result of enemy action, some in accidents, some from illness.25 A total of 1,350 women received state awards for their service.26 Two of the three women who were killed when an AN-12 was shot down over Kabul airport on 29 November 1986 were on the way to their first posting in Jalalabad. One had been recruited in the Soviet Union sixteen days earlier; the other only six days before.27
Like the soldiers, the women were first sent to a transit camp in Kabul until their final destination was decided. Some enterprising women got so bored with waiting that they took matters into their own hands. The twenty-year-old Svetlana Rykova hitched a flight from Kabul to Kandahar, then persuaded a helicopter pilot to take her to Shindand, the great airbase in western Afghanistan. There she was offered a job in the officers’ mess. She refused it and held out until a vacancy opened as assistant to the director of financial services. She served in Afghanistan from April 1984 to February 1986.
Tatiana Kuzmina was a single mother in her early thirties. She served in Jalalabad first as a nurse, but then managed to wangle a job in a BAPO (Boevoi Agitatsionno-Propagandistski Otryad), a Military Agitation Propaganda Detachment. Tatiana was the only woman in this unit, which delivered food, medicine, and propaganda to the mountain villages around Jalalabad, put on concerts, and helped the sick and the mothers with their new babies. While she was out on a mission with the detachment on the eve of her final return to the Soviet Union, she was drowned in a mountain river. It was two weeks before her body was found.28
Lilya, a highly qualified typist on the staff of one of the military districts back in the Soviet Union, was not paid enough to take her through to the end of the month and she made up the difference by collecting bottles for salvage. She could not afford adequate clothing for the winter. But in the 40th Army she was warm and well fed, beyond what she had believed possible.29
Many women did get married, often while they were still in Afghanistan, whether that was their original intention or not. One said, ‘All of us women are lonely and frustrated in some way. Try to live on 120 roubles a month, as I do, especially if you want to dress decently and have an interesting holiday once a year. “They only go over there to find themselves a husband,” people often say. Well, what’s wrong with that? Why deny it? I’m 32 years old and I’m alone.’30 Marriages could only be formally registered with the Soviet authorities in Kabul. A young couple from the 66th Independent Motor-rifle Brigade in Jalalabad were killed by rocket grenade fire on the road to the airport shortly after they had left the garrison. Natasha Glushak and her fiancé, an officer from the brigade’s communications company, managed to get to Kabul and register their marriage. Instead of flying back, they returned aboard a BTR. Just as it was arriving at Jalalabad, it was blown up by a remotely detonated mine. Only the upper half of Natasha’s body was recovered.31
The women were far outnumbered by the men, whose attitude to them was mixed. Colonel Antonenko, who commanded the 860th Independent Motor-rifle Regiment, said, ‘There were forty-four women in the regiment: nurses, laboratory assistants in the water purification station, waitresses, cooks, a canteen manager, shop assistants. We had no store of blood. When the regiment came out of battle, if we had wounded, the women would occasionally give their own blood. That really happened… Our women were wonderful and worthy of the highest praise.’32
There was no dispute about the role of the nurses and doctors. One nurse remembered when soldiers brought in a wounded man, but wouldn’t leave, saying, ‘We don’t need anything, girls, can we just sit by you for a bit?’ Another remembered how one young boy, whose friend had been blown to pieces, couldn’t stop talking to her about it.33 A telephone operator in a Kabul hotel who visited a mountain outpost where the men often saw no one for months at a time was asked by the commander, ‘Miss, would you take off your cap? I haven’t seen a woman for a whole year.’ All the soldiers came out of the trenches just to look at her hair. ‘Here, back home,’ one nurse later remarked, ‘they’ve got their mums and sisters and wives. They don’t need us now—but over there they told us things you wouldn’t normally tell anybody.’34
After he left the Central Hospital for Infectious Diseases in Kabul, where he had been treated for a mixture of typhus, cholera, and hepatitis, one young officer started an affair with the nurse who had looked after him. His envious fellow officers told him maliciously that she was a witch. She drew portraits of her lovers and hung them on the wall of her room. His three predecessors had all been killed in action. Now she began to draw him too. He was half gripped by the superstition. But she never finished the drawing and he was only wounded, not killed. ‘We soldiers were very superstitious while the war was going on,’ he later said ruefully. He lost touch with his nurse after leaving Afghanistan. But he always preserved the warmest memory of her.35
At the end of the day the nurses got little official recognition for what they had done. Alexander Khoroshavin, who served in the 860th Independent Moto
r-rifle Regiment in Faisabad, discovered to his disgust twenty years after the war that Ludmila Mikheeva, who had been a nurse with the regiment in 1983–5, was not entitled to any of the benefits which even the most unprepossessing veteran received for his service in Afghanistan.36
The women were too often subjected to unbearable pressure from men prepared to use threats as well as blandishments. Many of the veterans talked of them with distasteful contempt. They called them chekistki, implying that they sold themselves for cheki, cheques, the special currency used by the Soviets in Afghanistan. Some conceded that women who went to Afghanistan as nurses and doctors may have done so for the best of reasons. But few of them had a good word for the others, the secretaries, the librarians, the storekeepers, or the laundrywomen. These they accused of going to Afghanistan solely in search of men and money.
The women themselves always resented the slander. They resorted to a variety of defensive tactics. Some accepted one protector in order to keep the others off.37 Many Second World War generals, such as Rokossovski and Zhukov, had ‘Field Service Wives’ (PPZh—Pokhodno-Polevaya Zhena), who travelled with them from post to post. Now the institution was revived: it is portrayed with compassion by Andrei Dyshev in his novel PPZh, about a volunteer nurse, Gulya Karimova, and her lover Captain Gerasimov.38
Valeri Shiryaev, the military interpreter, thought that all this represented the social reality inside Russia itself: many of the men came from the provinces and regarded women as prey or as something to be knocked about. But at least in Afghanistan the Party representatives sensibly did not try to interfere with people’s relationships as they would have done back home. There were inevitable tensions: ‘The smaller the garrison, the fewer the women, and the greater the competition, which sometimes led to fights, duels, suicide, and the search for death in battle.’39
Not all the Soviet women in Afghanistan came there in the service of the Soviet state. Some came as the wives of Afghans, often students, whom they had met at home. Galina Margoeva was the wife of the engineer Haji Hussein. She and her husband remained in Kabul through all the changes in regime, through the horrors of the civil war and the depredations of the Taliban, living in their apartment in the microrayon by the housing construction combine near the airport. Tania was the wife of Nigmatulla, an Afghan officer who had trained in the Soviet Union and married her despite the opposition of her family and his own superiors. Their first child was born in Minsk. After five years he was posted first to Kabul, then to Kandahar and then to Herat. He continued to serve despite the changes of regime: he was the political officer of a division under Najibullah, a brigade under the mujahedin, and a division again under the Taliban. Tania was with him throughout. She wore the veil, learned Farsi, but remained an atheist. When Nigmatulla’s three brothers were killed, she took the nine orphans into her family and brought them up with her own children.40
Life and Death in Kabul
In Kabul there was a curfew after eight o’clock, you could not safely walk in a large part of the city, and there was always shooting at night. Although the city was heavily garrisoned and its streets were continually patrolled by troops, police, and armoured vehicles, the mujahedin occasionally mounted attacks inside Kabul itself. In January 1981 they got close enough to the villa of the Chief Soviet Military Adviser in the embassy quarter to attack it with rocket-propelled grenades. The same day they attacked—unsuccessfully—a key electric power station some twenty-five miles outside Kabul. The following day a large cinema and the Soviet bookshop were blown up. In the next few days there were more than two hundred terrorist attacks in other major cities.41 In 1983 a bomb under the table in Kabul University dining room killed nine Soviets, including a woman professor.42
People always carried their personal weapons and every apartment block had an armed guard. Nevertheless the capital was thought to be safe enough for senior officials and military advisers to bring their wives and families to live with them. Their standard of living was often higher than it would have been at home. Most lived in the microrayon, the pay was good, parcels and letters arrived regularly. The children were educated in the embassy school: it had to work in three shifts to accommodate them all, and even so it was overcrowded. You could watch the latest Soviet films in the embassy or the Soviet House of Culture.
The range in the embassy shop was limited, and the wives could buy only the goods that matched their husbands’ rank. So they spent much of their time shopping in the local market in the old microrayon, the parvanistka, a Russification of the words parva nist—‘not to worry’. Here they could find Western consumer goods and clothes which none of them had ever seen back home, some of it sent by Western aid agencies to relieve the Afghan poor. They bargained ruthlessly for second-hand jeans, jackets, and dresses, despite threats from the authorities to send them straight back to the Soviet Union if they persisted in shopping. Needless to say, the threats had no effect.43
As the security situation deteriorated, greater constraints were placed upon the Soviet women in Afghanistan. In Jalalabad, after a number had been killed, women were not allowed to go on the streets without an armed escort. By 1986 they were not allowed to go without escort even into the centre of major cities such as Kabul. But the temptations of the Afghan bazaars, with their rich variety of Western consumer goods and designer clothes, were too great for some to resist. The more daring or irresponsible of them found their way to the bazaars despite the obstacles. Some hoped that if they kept their mouths shut while they were walking through the bazaars they would be mistaken for Western missionaries whom—they optimistically believed—the mujahedin would leave unharmed.44
The advisers were never specially targeted by the mujahedin. But there were casualties nevertheless. Evgeni Okhrimiuk was a geologist who was posted to Afghanistan in 1976, when he was already sixty-three years old; at that time geologists were among the few Soviet advisers then working there. Okhrimiuk was put in charge of the team searching for natural resources, especially natural gas. Once the war started, and work in the outlying provinces became too difficult, he and his colleagues worked in the neighbourhood of Kabul, looking for water and building materials.
On 18 August 1981 Okhrimiuk left his apartment in the microrayon in his official car with his usual driver to go to his office about a mile away. He never arrived. The Russians later learned what had happened. Okhrimiuk agreed to let his driver give a lift to a couple of relatives. It was a put-up job. The two men took Okhrimiuk prisoner, so that he could be exchanged for the brother of one of the local guerrilla commanders, who had been captured by the Afghan army. Okhrimiuk wrote to his people that his captors had taken him on foot for five days to a hiding place in the high mountains, and asked for a helicopter to pick him up once the exchange had been agreed. Unfortunately the commander’s brother had already been shot. There were protracted negotiations about a ransom. They petered out. After Okhrimiuk had spent a year in captivity, the French Communist paper L’Humanité reported that he had been executed. His wife asked for a memorial to be erected in a Moscow cemetery. The authorities refused permission.45
Aleksei and Marina Muratov first went to Afghanistan in 1970, above all because they needed the money. In Moscow they both worked as junior scientific assistants in the university, they had two sons, and they had to rely on help from Aleksei’s parents to get by. In Kabul Aleksei lectured in the polytechnic and Marina worked as a secretary. They liked the country and the people, and they remained there for three years.
Then the war came. ‘We understood from the beginning,’ said Marina later, ‘that the invasion was a crime. And when we returned to Afghanistan in the autumn of 1981, we continually felt ashamed: ashamed for our country which had sent its soldiers there to kill and be killed.’ This time both Aleksei and Marina taught in the Polytechnic Institute. Marina helped prepare Afghan students who were going to study in the Soviet Union.
They got used to the wartime conditions—continual shooting, breakdowns in the supply
of electricity, sleeping with an automatic rifle under the bed—and the difficulties of life in the Soviet community, where you could be sent home for stepping even an inch out of line, and where their immediate superior disliked the Afghans and drank a lot too much.
The movements of the advisers and their families who lived at the Polytechnic Institute were strictly controlled. Alarms were signalled by the firing of a rocket, three long bursts from an automatic rifle, and by repeated banging on a length of rail outside the guardroom. Those who were assigned to the local defence force took up their positions; the rest took shelter. All lights in the apartments had to be turned out. The all clear was signalled by separate blows on the rail, by word of mouth, and by radio. The radios in the apartments had to be left on all the time.
The polytechnic regularly came under fire, and the inhabitants had to keep their eyes out for bombs and booby traps hidden under tables and in corners. Marina once picked up an explosive device disguised as an electric torch, but luckily it did not go off. She rarely saw any bloodshed, though she was there when a member of the embassy was shot down outside a shop after collecting his son from school. The boy sat by his body for forty minutes before he was picked up.
Towards the end of their third year in Afghanistan Aleksei and Marina went shopping. On their way out of the polytechnic she noticed one of the young Afghan guards looking at her oddly. She thought he must be under the influence of drugs. As they were returning to the polytechnic she fell over; it was only later that she realised the man had shot her. Aleksei was lying just behind her. He was dying. Marina subsequently had ten operations to save her leg. Her Afghan students visited her every day; one brought his father from the northern city of Mazar-i Sharif to pray for her.46