Afgantsy

by Rodric Braithwaite

  Life and Death in the Provinces

  Work in the provinces was more difficult than in Kabul and more dangerous too. The advisers had to travel across roads that were regularly mined. One group of Komsomol advisers from Kabul was ambushed and a woman was killed. In Herat the advisers were in principle only allowed to travel in armoured vehicles. But often there would be none available, so they had to travel in ordinary vehicles. And though the armour might protect you from bullets, it would not save you from a roadside mine. Herat did have one advantage, however. If you ran out of vodka, you could send a special messenger to get some from Kushka, the major logistics base, only three hours away by road.47

  As well as being dangerous, the work in the regions was depressing. In Logar province the advisers discovered that not one village supported the Kabul regime. Only 2.5 per cent of the children there were going to school.48 From 1984 to 1986 Alexander Yuriev was in Kandahar: he had volunteered to go there when his predecessor, Grisha Semchenko, had been badly wounded. He described the state of the city in his diary: ‘Kandahar is a very beautiful town. But half of it has been destroyed, whole streets and blocks are in ruins, and the surviving buildings are pitted with scars from shell splinters and bullets. It is very dangerous to drive around: the rebels are firing from the green zone outside the city, and mount ambushes inside the city itself. Everyone goes around with their guns at the ready. What makes it worse is that we control only two of the city’s six administrative regions. The other four are controlled by the rebels, and the road along which we have to travel goes through the middle of them.’49

  Yuriev wrote home cheerfully enough: ‘Everything is fine with me. I live in a villa outside town, which was built by the Americans. Our working day is quite short—from 8–9 a.m. to 2 p.m. We sometimes get two or three days off in the week.’ These bland words were not inaccurate, but they concealed the reality. The villa had indeed been built by Americans constructing the local airport. But the water supply had broken down, and there was neither lighting nor heating. The place was bombarded several times a day. ‘During the bombardments, you made sure there were two walls between you and the street. You lay on the floor in your flak jacket and helmet, and hoped that there wouldn’t be a direct hit on the ceiling.’ It was several miles from the villa to the Kandahar headquarters of the local committee of the DOMA, where Yuriev worked. The road was always heavily mined: every week someone got blown up on it. Every morning a flail tank cleared the mines, Soviet soldiers were posted along the road, and it was safe to travel. Then the soldiers were withdrawn and the road was back in the hands of the rebels. So Yuriev had to get home again by two o’clock. If serious fighting was going on, it was better not to leave the house at all; those were counted as days off. Fighting went on all around, even on working days. ‘There was fighting on 10 and 11 August [1985],’ writes Yuriev in his diary. ‘Many dead and wounded. We open a branch of the Institute for Youth Workers of the Central Committee of the DOMA… Comrade Khanif spoke at the meeting. He said that the branch was being opened in the middle of a war. But that was necessary, because young people needed to learn the theory of revolution, and use it in the course of the revolutionary struggle. In the open, on the street, I hold the first lesson for students of the branch on “The place and role of DOMA in the political system of Afghan society”.’50

  The advisers could go for weeks without hearing a word of Russian spoken. Not everyone was able to stand the nervous tension. ‘How can one describe the conditions in which we lived?’ asked Alexander Gavrya, who was in Afghanistan from October 1982 to October 1985, and again from April to November 1988. ‘Well, take for example Chag-charan, in the province of Ghor. It was deep in the mountains, and helicopters flying there were shot down, so that you had to get there in an armed column, which might have to fight its way through. I was there once, and called in on Sasha Babchenko, one of our advisers. Suddenly I heard someone wailing on the other side of the wall, loudly, terribly, like an animal. I jumped for my gun. “Don’t worry,” said Sasha, “that’s an adviser from another department. He gets drunk and wails every evening. The boys will soon calm him down.”’51

  The rebels controlled the countryside by night, even if they did not do so by day. There was little opportunity to work effectively with the peasants. And there was of course no proletariat to work with since there was almost no industry in the country anyway. So the advisers concentrated on building up the local party and youth organisations, on helping the schools, and setting up children’s summer camps. One visitor from the Soviet Union tactlessly gave a talk to a local school on how Soviet children helped their elders fight the Germans by putting sand in their machine guns and tanks. The listeners naturally pricked up their ears. The divisional commander was duly furious: ‘Don’t ever let a loudmouth like that get within range of my pistol again.’52

  Yusuf Abdullaev, another youth adviser, reported on a trip round the provinces in June 1981: ‘The situation is very difficult. Only the regional centres are in the hands of the people’s power [the Kabul regime]… Everyone’s efforts are directed to the struggle against the rebels. After an attempt to open a school they broke the arms and the legs of four of the children. There are strong feelings of hostility towards the Soviets, and towards the Russian soldiers, for which the soldiers themselves are often to blame. The rebels have burned a column of eighteen vehicles carrying food, which they commandeered in order to sell. There is no sign of the Afghan army and Tsarandoi. The people who are doing the fighting are our own military units and some of the malishi [militia detachments for the defence of the revolution] from among the local population. The rebels terrorise the locals—they fine the families of those who are collaborating with the authorities twenty or forty thousand afgani [the Afghan currency].’53

  By February 1982 Abdullaev was even more gloomy. There were over a hundred schools in Farakh province: perhaps no more than ten were open. Only four thousand out of more than twenty-one thousand children of school age were studying. Not one of the fifty-one cooperatives was working. The local Communist youth organisation was totally disorganised, and probably had no more than two hundred members. There were more than forty rebel bands operating in the area; their average age was under thirty. Abdullaev nevertheless believed that most of the population accepted that government terror and violence had declined with the installation of the Babrak regime, and that the bands were discrediting themselves by their behaviour. But people remained very cautious. A few months later Abdullaev reported from Khost that no one mentioned Babrak Karmal, apart from an Afghan officer who had shouted out, ‘Death to Karmal!’ at a political meeting in his artillery regiment.

  Herat, where it had all started, was contested territory throughout the war. The mujahedin controlled the old city, while the government and the Russians controlled the suburbs and the essential main road which skirted them. The Soviet advisers lived in the Hotel Herat, which had been built a few years earlier on the edge of the city on the road to the airport, and had been popular with tourists. By now it had been transformed into a small fortress: sandbags on the balconies, a BTR and a mortar team at the entrance, and instead of a liveried doorman a heavily armed soldier in a flak jacket. The inhabitants were advised to travel with an armoured escort even inside the city.

  In June 1981 one of the Komsomol advisers, Gena Kulazhenko, set off to drive the short distance from the airport to the hotel. There was no escort available, so he took a Toyota taxi. He never arrived. His colleagues from Kabul got no help from the Soviet military or civilian authorities, and went themselves to Herat to find out what had happened. They managed to find the Toyota, riddled with bullets; a local mullah said he knew where Kulazhenko’s grave was. They set off escorted by a tank and two BTRs, which promptly got stuck in the narrow street of the local kishlak. The mullah led them on foot to a grave, but the corpse they dug up was badly decomposed and was not that of Kulazhenko. They then fell into an ambush. Later one of the local rebel bands put out
a leaflet saying that Kulazhenko had been executed and buried in secret.54

  This was the first of four fatal casualties suffered by the Komsomol advisers. Nikolai Serov then died in 1984 of cancer of the blood, Ator Abdukadyrov was killed in a bombardment, and Alexander Babchenko died in 1987 just before he was due to go home.

  Nikolai Komissarov was a Komsomol official from Kazan. He was sent to Faisabad in 1982. There were eighteen other advisers there, four military, the rest civilians, living in rented accommodation in the town. Komissarov was responsible for eleven kishlaks, which he and his Tajik interpreter visited regularly, unarmed, to do youth work; one of their triumphs was to persuade the local girls’ school to abandon the veil. They had other tasks as well: to acquire intelligence and to help set up local self-defence organisations.55

  When Komissarov heard that the whole of the senior class in one of his schools had been persuaded to go over to the rebels he took a military driver and drove off to see what was happening. The kishlak was deep in the countryside and to go there without an armoured escort was an exceptionally dangerous thing to do. Two armoured vehicles were sent to rescue him if they could. It turned out to be unnecessary. ‘When we were halfway there,’ Captain Igor Morozov recounted, ‘we found his car. The soldier, white-faced from what he had been through, was gripping the steering wheel convulsively. Komissarov was sitting beside him without batting an eyelid, and even tried to make a joke of it, the bastard. What he had said to those schoolboys no one knows. But it’s a fact that none of them joined the rebels. Komissarov was reprimanded for his breach of discipline—quite rightly.’56

  Vyacheslav Nekrasov came from Sverdlovsk (Yekaterinburg), where he worked as a lathe operator and foreman in a defence factory, served in the army, and studied at the Higher Komsomol School. He was twenty-eight years old and working as First Secretary of a local Komsomol committee when he was chosen in 1982 to go to Afghanistan to advise on youth affairs. Like others, he told his family he was being sent to Mongolia. He would work there for a year, he said, and would then bring them out to join him. He bought a Mongolian dictionary to back up his story.

  Nekrasov and his interpreter, Dodikhudo Saimetdinov, flew to Kabul in October 1982, which they found far more sophisticated and Westernised than they had been led to believe. In November they were sent to work in Faryab province in northern Afghanistan.

  Here Nekrasov was given a good deal of freedom by his bosses to act as he thought best. One project was to send a group of young leaders to see how Muslims lived in the Soviet Union. Nekrasov and Saimetdinov managed, with considerable difficulty, to persuade a local mullah to go with them. It was worth it: shortly after the mullah returned, Nekrasov heard him describe the visit in glowing terms over the muezzin loudspeakers.

  On a visit to Kabul, Nekrasov laid hands on a mobile cinema, complete with a library of Indian, Soviet, and Afghan films and three Afghan operators. He cadged an aeroplane to fly the team to Fariab and took it around the province. The films were popular even in otherwise hostile kishlaks. Nekrasov’s team did not charge for tickets and there were only two conditions: there should have been no shooting in the kishlak for a week before the performance and weapons had to be left outside. Ironically, one film popular among the Afghans was the comedy thriller White Sun of the Desert (Beloe Solntse Pustynya), among the most successful of all Soviet films, about the war in the 1920s against the rebels in Central Asia—rebels who were ethnically similar to the Afghans themselves.

  Like the other civilian political advisers, Nekrasov did get mixed up in military operations from time to time. But his contacts also occasionally enabled him to negotiate ceasefire arrangements with the local guerrilla leaders, saving civilian lives as well as those of the fighters on both sides.57

  The number of specialists and advisers was run down from 1986 onwards as the aim of modernising Afghanistan’s society and its political and economic system came to seem more and more unattainable. It was a bitter disappointment for those who had risked their lives and health in what they believed was a good cause.

  And yet when people back in the Soviet Union asked them how they managed to survive the horrors, many of them discovered that they had fallen in love with Afghanistan. ‘We did not survive—we lived. We lived life to the full. Everything was interesting, every day was packed,’ wrote Vyacheslav Nekrasov. ‘Of course we were young, carefree, quick to make new friends. Even though more than ten years have passed, we are still like a single family of brothers.’58

  – EIGHT –

  Soldiering

  Even when they are on campaign, the soldiers in most armies spend little time fighting. Instead they hang around, grumble about their officers, their sergeants, and the stupidity of the military machine in general, avoid extra duties, scrounge for food, try to get drunk, think and talk incessantly about women (though not in battle, when they have other things on their minds), boast disgracefully, and engage in laddish horseplay which sometimes degenerates into bullying and physical violence. All this apparently pointless activity, which the British call ‘soldiering’, has one invaluable by-product. It reinforces the sense of comradeship which is essential to the soldiers’ survival in a fight.1

  The soldiers of the 40th Army were little different. They lived in primitive and unhealthy surroundings, freezing in winter, boiling in summer, with few amenities and practically no female company. They ate bad and sometimes insufficient food. They succumbed to epidemic disease. They were often bullied by their officers, by their sergeants, and by the senior soldiers. They got no leave, except perhaps to attend the funeral of an immediate family member. But they endured hardship with the stoicism of the Russian soldier throughout the ages, and they were willing to go on fighting for their comrades even when the war itself seemed to have lost any purpose.

  The Conscripts

  However reluctantly, most young men in the Soviet Union accepted service in the army as an inescapable staging post on the road to adulthood. The ideals of patriotism, duty, the leading role of an omniscient Communist Party, and the superiority of the Soviet way of life were drilled into them from their earliest days. Some of these ideals stuck.

  Conscripts served for two years. The annual batch of recruits was called up in two massive levies, in spring and autumn, and their heads were shaved, a tradition from Tsarist times. After one month’s basic training, those destined for Afghanistan were usually sent for three months into ‘Quarantine’—training camps in the Central Asian republics—where the physical conditions were similar to those in Afghanistan. So those who were called up in the spring might not actually get to Afghanistan itself until August. They would then serve there for some twenty months, though commanders could and did hold back soldiers due for demobilisation until the next bunch of new recruits had arrived.2

  Conscripts who already had a speciality—higher education, medical or other relevant qualifications—would serve in an appropriate capacity; or they might be selected for six months’ training as sergeant-drivers or gunners before going to Afghanistan, and would then serve there only eighteen months. Able soldiers could be promoted to sergeant after a year or eighteen months in the field. The power lay with their commanders, who could also reduce a sergeant to the ranks again if he failed to perform.3

  Despite the surrounding secrecy, parents quickly realised what was going on. Those with money or influence—parents from Moscow or Leningrad or the Baltic States—had regularly bribed the recruiting office or pulled strings to keep their sons out of the army.4 They did so with even greater determination once the war began. And so the boys who fought were mostly from the rural and working classes. A survey of fifteen hundred soldiers taken in 1986 showed that more than two-thirds were from the countryside or from working-class families with no secondary education, at a time when nearly two-thirds of the population already lived in cities. Nearly a quarter came from broken families. Not one came from a family with a background in the Party, bureaucratic, institutional, or military el
ite.5 Colonel General Krivosheev, the military historian, remarked sarcastically that they might as well restore ‘the old romantic name of the armed forces—The Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army’.6

  Sometimes the authorities did not bother to tell the conscripts where they were going, but simply bundled them off with a round of vodka to ease the transition.7 Even when they knew their destination, they were supposed to tell their families only that they would be serving abroad. The prohibition was eroded with time, but many soldiers—like the youth adviser Vyacheslav Nekrasov—still tried to ease their families’ anxiety by saying they were going to Mongolia. Most parents were not fooled: Vladislav Tamarov’s father replied to his first soothing letter home that he shouldn’t think his parents were stupid: they knew perfectly well where he was.8

  On the eve of his departure Andrei Ponomarev was paraded with his fellow conscripts and told that anyone not wishing to go to Afghanistan should take three paces forward: he would then serve in the Soviet Union. Much as they might have liked to, neither Ponomarev nor anyone else did so out of a sense of shame and a fear that they would be ostracised. Ponomarev later served in the 860th Independent Motor-rifle Regiment in Badakhshan in north-east Afghanistan.9

  In May 1985 Vitali Krivenko and his fellow conscripts were taken by train and plane more than twelve hundred miles from his home in Kazakhstan to a training camp outside Leningrad. There they were sent to the bathhouse, given two hours to get their new uniforms in order, and started their training straight away. The standard infantry training—route marches, field exercises, shooting, drill, political classes, and PT—was very harsh. So were the drill sergeants. But when it came to the test of battle, Krivenko found that the training had served him well and that he had become a good general-purpose soldier.