Afgantsy

by Rodric Braithwaite

  But the real treasures were to be found in the bazaars, which bulged with Japanese electronics, fashionable Western clothes, sneakers and jeans, cassette recordings of Western and even Soviet music banned back home. For the shopkeepers at least, the invasion was a business opportunity. For the soldiers, it was their first contact with a market economy, ‘a ticket to another life’.49

  The problem was that neither the soldiers nor the officers had the wherewithal to satisfy their desires. The officers were paid reasonably well by Soviet standards: a lieutenant would get a lump sum of 250 roubles on finishing his training; his pay thereafter would be 200 roubles a month. By way of comparison, at that time an engineer designing rocket-guidance systems got 250 roubles a month.50 But conscripts did very much worse. Some of their salary was paid into Sberbank, the national savings back, which they could draw when they finished their service. They would get small lump-sum payments for injuries. But in the field sergeants only got twelve to eighteen roubles a month. A specialist—a sniper or a machine-gunner—would get nine roubles. Ordinary soldiers were paid a miserable seven roubles. At that time the average (minimum) wage in the Soviet Union was one hundred roubles a month.

  So both officers and men turned to various forms of corruption. The 40th Army was not unique: the victorious Allied armies had done much the same in Europe after 1945. But the corruption in the 40th Army was on a heroic scale. Vladimir Snegirev, the correspondent from Komsomolskaya Pravda, called it the grabarmy where everyone grabbed what he could (by a useful coincidence, the Russian word grabarmia combines the noun armia with the verb grabit, to steal or loot).51 The detachments guarding the Salang Highway would shake down passing Afghan vehicles. Storekeepers and lorry drivers would conspire to take their cut from the cargoes they were transporting. ‘One enterprising soldier,’ wrote Snegirev, ‘detached the spare wheel of my car during the brief half-hour that I was talking to the political officer of a helicopter regiment. The theft took place in broad daylight on the territory of an elite unit, right next to the staff building, practically under the eyes of the sentry. Oho! I thought. If the “internationalist warriors” could so cheerfully pinch anything that was not nailed down even from their own people, I could imagine how they behaved with the Afghans.

  ‘The quartermasters of military units stationed throughout the country secretly gave the shopkeepers condensed milk, flour, fat, butter, sugar; and with the money they made they would enthusiastically acquire goods which previously they had seen only on the television. The civilian specialists were not far behind them. For a crate of vodka you could get three fur jackets; back in the Soviet Union you could sell the jackets for enough money to buy a second-hand car.’

  The soldiers necessarily operated on a more modest scale. ‘If you were cunning you could put together enough money to drink Coca-Cola or Fanta, drinks still unknown in the Soviet Union; or take souvenirs home for your family—a folding umbrella, local jewellery, or (the pinnacle of their dreams) “Montana” jeans.’52

  ‘Some of the guys brought porcelain, precious stones, jewellery, carpets,’ one private soldier said. ‘They picked them up in battle when they went into the villages, or bought them. For example, the magazine of a Kalashnikov bought you a make-up set for your girlfriend, including mascara, eyeshadow and powder. Of course the cartridges were “cooked”, because a cooked bullet can’t fly, it just kind of spits out the barrel and can’t kill. We’d fill a bucket or a bowl with water, throw in the cartridges, boil them for a couple of hours and sell them the same evening. Everyone traded, officers as well as the rest of us, heroes as well as cowards. Knives, bowls, spoons, forks, mugs, stools, hammers, they all got nicked from the canteen and the barracks. Bayonets disappeared from guns, mirrors from cars, spare parts, medals… You could sell anything, even the rubbish collected from the garrison, full of cans, old newspapers, rusty nails, bits of plywood, and plastic bags. They sold it by the truckload, with the price depending on the amount of scrap metal.’53

  Much of this thieving went unpunished. From time to time the authorities would send in a team of military prosecutors and a few exemplary punishments would be handed out. Then things would go on as before—not least because senior officers were also on the take.

  In the absence of other opportunities for entertainment, there was, of course, a great deal of drinking in the 40th Army. The officers mostly drank vodka and other spirits, which some consumed in vast quantities.54 The soldiers could not normally afford vodka. But they were philosophical: officers were permitted to drink and it was quite natural that they should. After all, they were long-term professionals, whereas the soldiers only had to put up with the army for two years. Anyway, they could make themselves a moderately alcoholic beer called braga, which brewed quickly in the Afghan heat.55 They hid it between the wooden lining and the canvas wall of their tents, or in the external fuel and water tanks of their armoured vehicles. And they had their drugs, mostly marijuana, which they called chars. A particular and rather rare delicacy was tea laced with hashish. They would trade drugs and drink with soldiers from other units, or buy them off the Afghans for cash, or in exchange for military goods of various kinds. They would share a joint or quench their thirst with braga on the way to battle, though most had the sense to shake off the influence before the fighting actually began.

  There are no reliable statistics about the extent of the drug-taking. Some veterans deny that it was widespread, at least in the elite units, and one has to aim off for the boasting of young men anxious to show how tough they were. Some soldiers became addicts, but most abandoned the habit when they were eventually demobilised. Two who did not were rescued from Pakistan in 1983 by the journalist Masha Slonim at the behest of the Daily Mail newspaper. Oleg and Igor both came from Ukraine. Oleg was a simple peasant and not at all bright. Igor was a Russian: he was comparatively sophisticated and wrote poetry. They had deserted because Oleg had accidentally killed a comrade and was under investigation, while Igor had heard that his girlfriend was going out with another man. They broke into the armoury of their unit near Kandahar, stole some weapons, and set out to walk to Pakistan. They had no map, hardly any water, and were soon captured by the mujahedin. They were taken to Peshawar, installed in a villa, and treated reasonably well. But they needed to shoot up, their captors gave them no syringes, and they ran away to get back to Afghanistan to find some. When they were recaptured, their captors chained them to a bed, and there they were kept, thin and unhealthy, until they were released to Masha Slonim. By then they were both in a dreadful state.

  On the plane to London they suffered serious withdrawal symptoms and Masha barely managed to keep them under control. They were then taken to a villa in Surrey, where they were to be interviewed for TV. They were in too bad a state and had to go to a London clinic, where their addiction was successfully brought under control. They were placed with a Ukrainian family in London, where they frequented a Russian restaurant in London, the Balalaika. A constant visitor there was a nice man from the Soviet Embassy, who regularly bought them drinks. One fine day Igor and Oleg disappeared. They turned up at a press conference in the embassy, saying they wanted to go home and denouncing everyone they had met in Britain as intelligence agents—except Masha. After the two went back to the Soviet Union the Daily Mail reported that they had been shot. It was not so. Ivan wrote to say he was alive and well, though Oleg never surfaced again.56

  Guitar and Kalashnikov

  The soldiers took their guitars to Afghanistan, and they wrote and improvised a great deal of music and poetry, some of permanent value. These songs and poems reflect the history of the war: from a confident belief in the rightness of the cause, through the sounds of battle and the loss of comrades, to the disillusion and bitterness of failure.

  Some popular songs were written by established artists who visited the bigger bases from time to time. Alexander Rozenbaum’s song ‘The Black Tulip’, about the planes which flew the coffins of dead soldiers back to the Soviet
Union, and ‘We Will Return’, about Soviet prisoners of war, remained popular long after the war was over. Enterprising Afghan traders imported from the West recordings of songs that were frowned upon in the Soviet Union: the music of the Beatles and ABBA, and the songs of the immensely popular Soviet singer Bulat Okudzhava (1924–97), whose pieces hovered just this side of dissent and were not much appreciated by the authorities.

  But the soldiers’ attitude towards the professional singers was ambivalent. However eloquently these people sang, they had not seen battle themselves. Their music was artificial, constructed for effect, and over it, some thought, hung an atmosphere of commercial exploitation. For the real thing the soldiers made their own music on the guitars they had taken with them to the war. Or they listened to the songs of the soldier-bards, the people who had shared their trials, songs which became very popular, to the consternation of the authorities. The songs were banned by the political censorship, and the customs officers on the frontier cracked down heavily on attempts to bring taped versions into the Soviet Union. None of this stopped the songs from circulating throughout the 40th Army.

  The Afgantsy were acutely aware that their fathers and grandfathers had fought gloriously in the war against Hitler and there are self-conscious overtones almost of rivalry between the generations in the earlier songs. They were influenced by the songs of Vladimir Vysotski (1938–80), who had not fought in that war but had caught its spirit in many songs. They fastened on the poems of Kipling and his picture of Afghanistan, its people, and the fighting there. The authorities were less enthusiastic because Kipling was, they considered, an apologist for British imperialism in Afghanistan. Around the middle of the war a new theme emerged: nostalgia and sympathy for the White Guards, the soldiers who fought on the losing side of the civil war after the revolution in 1917 and who had upheld the heroism and discipline of Russian arms even as their country fell apart around them. The bards picked up the romances of those days about love and war and honour even in defeat. ‘[W]hy in the years of my youth did nobody publicly speak of the self-sacrifice of the White generals?’ wondered Alexander Karpenko, a bard and military interpreter. ‘And at this point my thoughts about the White Army’s role in the fate of Russia came to mingle with what was happening in Afghanistan. The prohibitions and silence which surrounded the White idea also stimulated the creative energies of the Afgantsy, including my own.’57 Towards the end, the mood of the songs began to change. Nostalgia was replaced by bitter songs about the sense of futility and defeat which settled on the 40th Army as the country in whose name it had been fighting began to fall apart.

  Most of the soldier-bards were officers, many from the special forces. Sergei Klimov wrote one of the first songs, about the explosion in the Afghan government communication centre which triggered off the attacks in Kabul in December 1979.58 But Yuri Kirsanov is often regarded as the dean of the bards. He served with a special forces group called Karpaty, an offshoot of Kaskad. He joined the KGB in 1976 and when he was posted to Afghanistan in 1980 he took his guitar with him. He was stationed in Shindand. He found—bizarrely—that travelling on operations in a BTR stimulated his creative ingenuity. He and a colleague systematically recorded the sounds of Afghanistan on a small tape recorder—the call of the muezzin, the rattle of armoured vehicles, the noise of battle and the cry of the jackal—and he used them as the introduction to his own songs. These he recorded in ‘studio’ conditions—in the regimental bathhouse, where he worked at night, when the electric current was more or less stable and the noise of war had died away. He composed to express the emotions of war and the soldiers’ hopes for a safe return. ‘Kirsanov’s songs succeeded in doing what the professional artists were unable to do,’ remarked one journalist. ‘They preserved the real and genuine truth of the Afghan war.’59

  Igor Morozov studied in the prestigious Bauman Technical University and then worked for a while as an engineer in the defence industry, where he helped to develop the improved model of the infantry warhorse, the BMP-2 infantry fighting vehicle. But then his father, who had been in military intelligence during the Second World War, persuaded him to go into the First Directorate of the KGB, the foreign intelligence department, which he joined in August 1977. He was sent to Afghanistan in 1981 after two months’ special training, served for a while in Kunduz, and was then posted to command the detachment of Kaskad in Faisabad in 1982. The team consisted of three officers and a handful of soldiers. They lived in a villa on the edge of the town guarded by KhAD. They had three BTRs, of which only one worked, three GAZ jeeps, two machine guns, two mortars, and three tons of ammunition. Neither the team commander nor his deputy spoke the local languages, and for three months they were without an interpreter. No one knew what the situation was in the province. The soldiers were members of the KGB’s frontier force (pogranichniki), and they were on the books of the 40th Army for pay and rations. But the three officers depended on headquarters in Moscow, who simply forgot about them. Their pay was six months in arrears and they had to scrounge their rations from the soldiers. They had to get their experience from the soldiers as well: the soldiers had been in Afghanistan for six months, they could speak a few words of the language, and had some idea of the situation.60

  By then Morozov was already a committed songwriter: ironically, ‘Batalionnaya Razvedka’ (Battalion Reconnaissance), which he wrote in honour of his father in 1975, later became one of his most popular ‘Afghan’ songs. He had quickly concluded that ‘the patriotic songs and music recommended by the authorities were not understood or accepted by the soldiers, because they absolutely failed to reflect either the spirit or the character of the war. The first signs of moral and spiritual decay were already beginning to appear in the Limited Contingent.’ He believed that ‘A country’s songs tell you what is ailing it.’ He began by playing Kirsanov’s songs to his soldiers, but soon began to compose for himself. When the fierce sandstorms whipped up by the wind which the soldiers called the ‘Afganets’ blew for days at a time, operations would be called off and Morozov would use the break to write. Soon his songs, too, were circulating throughout the 40th Army: ‘The Return’ and ‘We’re Leaving’, about the final departure of the 40th Army; ‘The Convoy from Tulukan to Faisabad’, ‘Rain in the Mountains of Afghanistan’, ‘The Song of the Bullet’, about the fighting; ‘Guitar and Kalashnikov’, about the relationship between art and war; songs from an earlier age such as the 1930s hit ‘The Blue Balloon’.

  Morozov finally left Afghanistan over the Salang Pass with the parachutists of the Vitebsk Division in 1989. Valeri Vostrotin’s 345th Guards Independent Parachute Assault Regiment, which was guarding the pass, is said to have started every day with Morozov’s bitter song ‘We’re Leaving’. Morozov and his friends, by now elderly colonels in retirement, were still performing their songs two decades after the war was over.61

  Most of the soldiers of the 40th Army were, of course, only too anxious to get away from the monotony and the fighting, to return home as soon as they could, to resume the lives which had been disrupted when they were issued with their call-up papers. Some—Lieutenant Kartsev and Sergeant Sergei Morozov—were to remember the years in Afghanistan as the best of their lives. More than one felt a pang as they left for the Soviet Union. ‘Suddenly they understood with blinding clarity that over there, in the future, there was nothing. All was dark, impenetrable, a vacuum. If you shouted, there would be no echo; if you hurled a stone, you would not hear it land. Life was carrying them into that emptiness, unmapped, unstoppable. From now on, everything lay in the past.’62

  – NINE –

  Fighting

  Fighting, like soldiering, differs little from time to time or place to place. It is something that cannot be properly understood by those who have not been there. Even among the soldiers themselves, there is ‘a gulf between men just returned from action, and those who have not been in the show, as unbridgeable as that between the sober and the drunk’. The Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan fou
ght for the same reasons as the British soldiers on the Somme, the Russians on the Eastern Front, the French in Indo-China and Algeria, and the Americans in Vietnam and Iraq: to do a job, for the sake of their fellow soldiers, to kill rather than be killed. Sometimes they broke. Sometimes they preferred a firefight to the frustration and boredom of soldiering. They rarely cared about the wider political implications of their war—their horizons were bounded by their platoon, their company, or their battalion. They counted the days until they could go home; and when they got home, some missed the comradeship and the rush of adrenalin. Life in battle had a meaning which civilian life could not match. An American soldier who fought in Afghanistan two decades later said, ‘People back home think we drink because of the bad stuff, but that’s not true… we drink because we miss the good stuff.’1