Afgantsy

by Rodric Braithwaite

  Problems

  There had always been a great deal of bullying in the Soviet army, and in the Tsarist army before it. But a more established ritual of bullying, dedovshchina, the ‘grandfather system’, emerged in the late 1960s.

  Russian commentators give various reasons for the rise of dedovshchina. The conscript army was demoralised. It was too large and the soldiers were underemployed. Many conscripts fell below the standards needed by a technically sophisticated force. Some were recruited from the prisons and brought with them the bullying rituals of the criminal world.

  Under this system, a soldier in his last six months was known as a ‘grandfather’ (ded). New recruits were made to clean the barracks, look after the grandfathers’ kit, get them cigarettes from the shop and food from the canteen. They were ritually humiliated, and beaten sometimes to the point of serious injury. Most endured, and consoled themselves with the thought that they too would be grandfathers one day. Some broke under the strain: they deserted, mutilated themselves, or committed suicide.

  Some, of unusual physical as well as moral strength, stood up for themselves and were eventually left alone. Krivenko was older than the other conscripts because he had spent time in prison. His age and experience gave him authority among the other soldiers, and the grandfathers dealt with him cautiously.10 Sergei Nikiforov was a judo expert and fought his tormentors to a standstill. Soldiers from the same republic or region stuck together in self-defence. The grandfathers in one unit were warned that if anything happened to the only two Chechen soldiers there, their countrymen would take a merciless revenge.11

  It depended, too, on where you were. The army could not afford to employ substandard soldiers in the elite strategic rocket forces, where the grandfather system was much less brutal. It was the same in the KGB’s frontier forces, who had a real job to do; and in the elite special forces and parachute units, where morale was usually high. Sergei Morozov, a sergeant in the 56th Guards Independent Airborne Assault Brigade, claimed that there was no dedovshchina in his unit: people were always too busy or too tired. When they were not on operations, all they wanted to do was eat and sleep.12

  In Afghanistan the system was less oppressive even in the motor-rifle units, because there too the soldiers had real work to do. The grandfathers still gave their juniors the run-around, but it was hard to preserve the distinctions in battle. And a bully risked being cut down by a bullet from his own side, as well as from the enemy: in the heat of the fight no one would bother to investigate.13 Even so, 33 per cent of the military crimes dealt with in the 40th Army in 1987 were ‘military bullying’. More than two hundred soldiers suffered in one year: some had been killed and others severely wounded.14

  Some Afgantsy maintained that despite its obvious negative features dedovshchina helped to maintain order and discipline.15 In front-line units, they said, the seasoned soldiers taught the new arrivals to keep themselves clean, obey orders, and care for their equipment. As a recruit, Andrei Ponomarev found the bullying very difficult to bear, and though he did not break, he often crept away after a ritual beating to weep in a corner. He and his colleagues vowed that when they became senior soldiers in their turn they would not use the methods that had been applied to them. But they found this did not work. The new recruits ceased to respect them and would not do what they were told. So Ponomarev too started to use his fists: it was, he said, the only reliable way of getting your point across.16 He and those who thought like him knew well enough that in other armies the positive aspects they claimed for dedovshchina were the responsibility of experienced professional NCOs. Alexander Gergel, a conscript sergeant in the 860th Independent Motor-rifle Regiment, accepted that dedovshchina had eaten away at the military system. That would not change, he thought, until the Russian army too was given the corps of long-service professional NCOs it lacked.

  In one serious way the 40th Army in Afghanistan differed from its predecessors: it had a massive health problem, of a kind the Soviet army had never experienced before. The Russians built seven military hospitals in Afghanistan, but chronic lack of funds meant that they were badly equipped, undermanned, and barely able to cope.17 The near collapse of the 40th Army’s medical services was one of the worst consequences of the improvisation and lack of funding which accompanied its deployment. One doctor in a brigade casualty clearing station expressed himself with particular bitterness: ‘One has to stick it out and look as if one is saving people. But how can you save people, when there are no medicines, no bandages, and no doctors? People die of infections, of disease, because they weren’t helped in time. Our superiors think that you can save people by giving them one injection against shock. But you can’t, and when the effect of the injection wears off, the patient gives up the ghost and there’s nothing we can do to help him. The only thing we have is alcohol, and even that doesn’t always help. If we had what we needed, we could save three-quarters of them, but as it is…’18

  He may have been exaggerating. But what is clear is that the medical services almost lost the battle not against war wounds, but against infectious disease. The figures speak for themselves. More than three-quarters of those who served in Afghanistan spent time in hospital. Some 11 per cent were wounded or injured. The rest—69 per cent of all those who served during the war—suffered from serious sickness: 28 per cent from infectious hepatitis, 7.5 per cent from typhoid fever, and the rest from infectious dysentery, malaria, and other diseases.19

  Units were often far below strength because so many of the soldiers were sick. The main scourge was hepatitis. The joke among the soldiers was that soldiers got jaundice, officers got Botkin’s disease, and generals were treated for hepatitis. There were stories that some soldiers evaded duty by getting medical orderlies in the hospitals to give them urine from infected patients: if you drank it, you got the disease.20

  By the end of 1981 every fourth soldier in the 5th Guards Motor-rifle Division in Shindand had been laid low. The commander, Boris Gromov, his deputies, and all the regimental commanders were down at the same time. The division was effectively unfit for battle.21 At any given moment up to a quarter, perhaps even a third, of the 40th Army might be incapacitated by disease. At the height of the epidemic, there was only one nurse for every three hundred patients.22

  Hepatitis was not the only problem. In the summer of 1985 a patrol from the 66th Independent Motor-rifle Brigade in Jalalabad drank the water from a roadside spring as they were returning from patrol. A few days later three of them collapsed on parade with cholera. More than half the brigade fell sick. A rumour circulated that the water had been deliberately infected by ‘two Europeans dressed in local clothes’. To prevent further infection, people said, the bodies were being cremated—something almost unheard of in what was still at heart an Orthodox country.23 The sick were isolated behind barbed wire, the doctors and nurses were isolated with them, and additional medical staff had to be flown in from Moscow as reinforcements.24

  The situation of the 40th Army thus resembled that of the British and French armies in the Crimean War, and for much the same reasons: dirty water, appalling sanitation, dirty cooks, dirty canteens, dirty clothes, poor diet. The Soviets prided themselves on the number of hospitals and orphanages they built in Afghanistan. But they filled more hospitals and orphanages than they constructed, and the bigger the hospital, the worse the sanitary conditions: the rate of hepatitis was highest not in the small outposts, but in the base camps, where it should have been easiest to prevent. The Soviet medical services in the Second World War were much better at controlling disease than their successors.

  But the successors were better off in one important way: they could evacuate casualties from the battlefield by helicopter. One sanguine account claimed that nine out of ten wounded soldiers received first aid in thirty minutes and got to a doctor in six hours.25 It was a matter of pride to evacuate the wounded and the bodies of the dead, even under fire and even at the risk of further casualties. The collapse of this tradition, sa
id one officer who had served in both wars, marked for him the degradation which distinguished the Soviet army in Afghanistan from the Russian army in Chechnya.26

  Everyday Life

  The 40th Army was deployed in four main bases, each housing a division and other units. The 5th Guards Motor-rifle Division was in Shindand near Helmand, where there was also a major airbase. The 201st Motor-rifle Division was in Kunduz in the north. The 108th Motor-rifle Division was in Kabul, and later at the airbase in Bagram. The 103rd Guards Air Assault Division was at Kabul airport. Lesser forces were based around the country—brigades detached from their parent divisions, independent regiments, isolated battalions, special forces units, and in the numerous zastavas. These were concentrated particularly in the south and east, facing the vulnerable thirteen hundred-mile frontier with Pakistan around Kandahar, Gardez, and Jalalabad. All these bases, even in Kabul, were defended against terrorist attack by rings of mines, barbed wire, and guard posts.

  In the larger bases the officers, the medical section, and the shop were eventually accommodated in ‘modules’, single-storey prefabricated plywood huts, painted green, with tiled washrooms, though the staff of the 108th Motor-rifle Division on the edge of Kabul continued to live in scruffy huts on the back of lorries.27 The rest—unlucky junior officers, the soldiers, the canteen, the kitchen, the stores, the armouries—were usually accommodated in tents. Women usually had separate modules, though occasionally they had to share them with the officers, separated by a partition from the men, though this did not always present an absolute barrier to the enterprising.

  Each base had a military hospital or casualty clearing station to deal with battle casualties and the far larger number of soldiers suffering from diseases, and a morgue where the dead were prepared for their journey home. Even the smallest bases had a ‘Lenin Room’, in which the soldiers could relax, with a portrait of Lenin and the current Soviet leader on the wall, a noticeboard with the latest political slogans, a few books and magazines, and somewhere to sit and write letters.

  Sometimes units were accommodated in existing buildings. The 3rd Battalion of the 56th Independent Air Assault Brigade was based in a former Anglican church mission near the Pakistan border. The handful of buildings and the wall around them were built of mud bricks mixed with cement. Outside the wall was a large refuse dump, where the garrison got rid of unwanted munitions along with household rubbish. Once the dump caught fire, and going to the nearby latrine became a dangerous business as shells and rockets exploded. The base was surrounded by minefields laid by the motor-rifle unit which had been there earlier. They had not had the sense to leave maps behind and so two or three times a year someone—usually one of the locals—blew himself up on an anti-personnel mine. By day the government controlled the surrounding villages; by night they were controlled by the rebels. A major operation was mounted against the rebels every year, but even if the authority of the government could be reasserted, it was never for long.28

  The 860th Independent Red Banner Pskov Motor-Rifle Regiment occupied a typical medium-sized base in Faisabad in Badakhshan province in north-east Afghanistan. The regiment arrived there in late January 1980 from its home in Kyrgyzstan, after marching for a month through the snow-covered mountains and over passes up to sixteen thousand feet high, a march which went down in army legend. The regiment soon suffered its first casualties: one soldier was captured and his mutilated body was found two days later. His murderer had foolishly held on to the man’s rifle. He was found and shot on the spot.29

  The regiment’s task was to block the caravan route from Pakistan and China through the Wakhan Corridor, a thin sliver of land carved out by the British eight decades earlier as a barrier between themselves and the Russians, and to prevent the lucrative export of lapis lazuli, which the insurgents mined in the high mountains. Its nominal strength was 2,198, but in practice it could usually muster no more than some fifteen hundred men because of casualties, sickness, and detachment.30 The base was about three miles outside Faisabad itself, in a broad valley surrounded by hills and mountains. It had a hospital, a shop, a bakery, a library, and a laundry. You could bathe in the fast-flowing River Kochka nearby, a dangerous business: thirty soldiers drowned in the course of five years. Such accidental deaths were normally written off for the record as battle casualties.

  The officers lived in modules. The soldiers lived in tents, each with room for sixty men, heated by two wood stoves in the winter. The better tents were made in three layers: the outside layer consisted of waterproof canvas, the next was made of thick material to provide insulation, and the inside layer was of light cloth to brighten the tent up.31 The inhabitants often covered the inside of their tent with wood from ammunition boxes. This made it more homely, kept out the draughts in the winter, and stopped it blowing about so much in the wind. The soldiers had no proper boxes in which to keep their possessions, so they used the space between the walls of the tents to hide letters, photos, presents for their families, home-brewed beer, drugs, and other contraband.

  The 1st Battalion was lucky enough to live in more permanent accommodation at Bakharak, some twenty-five miles from Faisabad, in a valley surrounded by high mountains and fed by three rivers, whose banks were thick with cherry trees. Villages lay on the broad mountain terraces, surrounded by orchards and small cultivated fields. Irrigation canals watered the whole valley. The battalion consisted of three rifle companies, mortar, rocket, and howitzer batteries, a reconnaissance platoon, a signals platoon, and an administrative platoon—nominally about five hundred men, though at times the number might fall to half that.

  The road from Bakharak to Faisabad was open at first. Supplies got through without trouble and the battalion commander could go to regimental meetings in Faisabad by jeep. But by the end of 1980 the battalion was cut off from the rest of the regiment by the insurgents. Attempts were made each summer to send through a supply column. Each summer the column got bogged down under fire and needed to turn back. So the battalion had to be supplied by helicopter: twice a day, except on Sundays, weather permitting. The helicopters would arrive in pairs, two Mi-8s, flying at a great height until they were over the landing strip, firing flares as protection against the mujahedin’s anti-aircraft rockets. The soldiers would rush to greet them as they landed, to unload the cargo and to collect their letters from home.

  The battalion lived in an old Afghan fort, about seventy-five yards square, with a watchtower on each corner. The men were on duty from five in the morning to ten at night, and slept in rooms built into three of the mud walls. The fourth wall was more than three feet thick and twelve feet high. The roofs were flat, made of wood branches and earth which had bonded together and kept the place cool in summer and warm in winter. The windows were covered with plastic and looked out on a gallery surrounding the internal courtyard. The soldiers built another low wall around the territory. It contained the elements of a garden, with shady trees, roses, and grass. A huge apricot tree stood in the middle and a thick mulberry tree in one corner. There were irrigation ditches with running water even inside the perimeter of the fort. Outside the wall were a small helicopter pad and a park for the battalion’s armoured vehicles. The generator sometimes worked for only two hours a night and the soldiers had to make do with kerosene lamps.32

  Improvements were added gradually. In the first year there was no bathhouse: the soldiers remained dirty throughout the winter until the ice broke on the river and they could wash themselves.33 The quarters were given wooden ceilings so that bits of wood and earth no longer fell on the sleepers’ heads. The walls were whitewashed. Brick stoves were built to keep the place warm. A line of concrete blocks was set up to commemorate the battalion’s dead. It was called the Alley of Glory, and the soldiers goose-stepped past it when they mounted the guard. The ‘Lenin Room’ acquired a television set: you could just about get two Soviet programmes when the generator was working. Sometimes a cinema operator brought a film from Faisabad. But for the most part th
e soldiers of the 1st Battalion had to amuse themselves as best they could. There were of course no women at Bakharak. From the vantage of their watchtowers, the soldiers would unscrew the sniperscopes from their rifles to look at the local women in their courtyards.34

  There was a straggling kishlak of about fifteen hundred inhabitants a few hundred yards from the fort. In 1982 the mujahedin shelled the fort a couple of times with mortars. Towards the end of the war a sentry was killed by a sniper. Otherwise the relationship between the inhabitants of the fort and the inhabitants of the kishlak was not particularly hostile. The soldiers were not supposed to go there on their own lest they were attacked or kidnapped. But they were occasionally allowed to visit the bazaar in armed groups with an officer, sometimes accompanied by armoured vehicles, to buy cigarettes and matches, sweets as a substitute for the sugar that they used to brew their own beer, braga, lamb and rice to make plov (pilaf) to celebrate someone’s birthday, jeans and tape recorders to take home, and fresh fruit, which cost next to nothing in season. The drugs were cheap too, or you could get them in exchange for a bar of soap.35

  Despite the hardships, the morale of the soldiers held up, for the most part, well enough. They did their duty on the battlefield and they endured stoically until the longed-for day of demobilisation arrived. Everything depended on the quality of their officers. The Soviet officers had been thoroughly trained in the principles of leadership: how to look after their men and how to manage them in battle.36 But when they arrived in Afghanistan most of them had no practical experience. And—as in other armies—not all of them were up to the job.