Afgantsy

by Rodric Braithwaite

  The Critics Speak Out

  Some brave spirits discreetly tried to bring their superiors to a sense of what was really going on. A Pravda correspondent called Shchedrov wrote to the Central Committee as early as November 1981 to say that the Afghan government was failing completely to take back the countryside from the rebels. People were willing to cooperate with the authorities, but on one condition—that they were adequately protected against retaliation by the government forces. This condition could not be met even in the vicinity of major Soviet bases: the authorities might control the territory by day, but the rebels controlled it by night. Even successful military operations, apparently, could not alter this basic fact.33

  A persistent critic was Colonel Leonid Shershnev. He made a habit of going into the villages, listening to what the inhabitants had to say and trying to understand their needs. It was he who had helped to write the pamphlet on Afghan traditions and culture which was handed out to officers and men of the 40th Army. In 1981 he was involved with the 190th Military Agitation Propaganda Detachment (BAPO), one of a number of units formed to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people.34 The detachment contained a Soviet doctor, a cinema operator, a youth adviser, two or three political officers, a group of young Afghan artists, Party propagandists, and a mullah. The plan was for the group to go into the villages north of Kabul to hand out food, cure the sick, and show films to the peasantry. Some shine was taken off the enterprise because it had to be escorted by a couple of armoured personnel carriers and a flail tank to clear mines. The simple view of the cheerful tank commander was that the only good Afghan was a dead Afghan.

  Shershnev concluded that the war was bound to escalate unless the army was involved not only in fighting, but in helping the local people. He wrote in a report to his superiors, ‘Since the end of March 1981 the military and political situation almost everywhere in Afghanistan has ground to a halt. The position in the country is now worse than it was in the same period last year. It is striking that the situation has become extremely serious even in regions where there were no large rebel bands, and where the geographical conditions are not conducive to their activities (the north, the plains, the areas bordering on the USSR). That means that part of the population which consists of national minorities related to peoples in the USSR (Uzbeks, Turkmens, Tajiks), who had previously adopted a wait and see attitude, have now joined in the fight against the people’s power [the Communist government] and the Soviet forces.

  ‘The enemy are striking in the most sensitive places: they are killing Party activists, patriots (including village elders), they are getting astride all the strategic lines of communication and interrupting transport, they are destroying important economic objects (they have blown up two drilling rigs at the Ainaksk copper mine each worth 200,000 roubles), schools (they have destroyed 1,400 already), hospitals, administrative buildings. Agriculture is suffering serious losses: the number of cattle is falling irreversibly… The rebels have succeeded in driving the people’s power out of a number of districts and regions which were liberated last winter, and have imposed counter-revolutionary organs of power (the so-called “Islamic committees”).’ He went on to criticise the Afghan political leadership and army. He praised the military skill of the rebels, and warned that they would not only be able to resist the weak Kabul regime for a long time, but would also be able to show a determined opposition to the Soviet forces.

  When he put these ideas to his superiors, the deputy commander of the 40th Army told him that his job was to think of his soldiers, not the Afghans. He appealed to Akhromeev, who listened to him attentively, but then told him, ‘The army exists to fight. It’s not its job to get mixed up in politics.’35

  Shershnev was not alone. Even so senior a figure as General Alexander Maiorov, the Chief Soviet Military Adviser in the early part of the war, soon came to the view that the war in Afghanistan was unwinnable. He never abandoned the belief that the Soviet Union had followed its legitimate interests by intervening in Afghanistan: the intervention was a consequence of the Cold War logic which led each of the superpowers to try to steal a march on the other wherever it could. But Afghans he respected, some of them serving officers in the Afghan army, told him that Afghanistan could not be conquered; it could perhaps be bought, but the Soviet Union was not rich enough for that. Babrak Karmal, he could see for himself, was weak, and often drunk. He concluded that Karmal should be replaced and that the Soviet Union should withdraw its forces as soon as it could.36

  In 1984 Shershnev went further, and wrote a long and critical report directly to the General Secretary of the Party, Konstantin Chernenko. He said that military operations in Afghanistan had taken on the character of punitive campaigns, the civilian population was treated with systematic and massive brutality, weapons were used casually and without justification, homes were destroyed, mosques defiled, and looting was widespread. ‘We have got ourselves into a war against the people, which is without prospects.’

  Surprisingly, Shershnev got away with it. Chernenko scribbled on his report, ‘Shershnev is not to be touched.’ Shershnev was not sidelined or expelled from the armed forces, partly because he was protected by like-minded senior officers such as General Dmitri Volkogonov, who at that time was head of the Main Political Directorate of the Armed Forces. But his promotion was delayed, and in the end his career came up against the buffers and he resigned from the army in 1991.

  Another military critic, Colonel Tsagolov, was less lucky. In August 1987 he wrote a personal and highly critical letter to Yazov, the Minister of Defence. He said in round terms that the Soviet military effort in Afghanistan had produced no results: ‘Huge material resource and considerable casualties did not produce a positive end result.’ Najibullah’s Policy of National Reconciliation would not lead to a breakthrough in the military or political situation, since the regime was rejected in the villages, where most Afghans lived. The PDPA was a broken reed and past saving and the idea of a coalition between the PDPA and any of the seven party leaders in Pakistan was an illusion. Tsagolov recommended ‘radical measures’ to help progressive forces preserve democracy in Afghan society, and rebuild friendship between the Soviet Union and Afghanistan. These thoughts were too abstract to be of any use. After Yazov failed to respond, Tsagolov took them to Ogonek, the campaigning newspaper, and was sacked from the army.37

  There was dissatisfaction lower down the army as well. Rastem Makhmutov was a professional soldier, a praporshchik. He arrived in Afghanistan with the 860th Independent Motor-rifle Regiment. Six months after he returned to the Soviet Union in the autumn of 1982, he resigned from the army in protest. Other officers who did the same had to apply several times to get out; there would be warnings and harassment, and some had to face a Court of Honour. Makhmutov was comparatively lucky. He got out of the army unscathed and was employed for a while as a test engineer in a factory building rocket engines, where he regularly gave talks about the war to his fellow workers, illustrated with the photographs he had taken in Afghanistan, much to the irritation of the authorities. Then for a while he lived an alternative lifestyle as a bearded goatherd on the Volga. Finally he settled down to run a small business in Moscow.38

  The main priority of the ordinary soldiers, as with most soldiers in most wars, was not to worry about the politics, or to change the course of events, but to fight as best they could, support their comrades in a scrimmage, and get home safe and sound. ‘The propaganda in the Soviet Union was very strong,’ said Alexander Gergel, the sergeant gunner from the 860th Independent Motor-rifle Regiment. ‘However bizarre it may seem today and even though I and my comrades knew that our country had got itself into a dead end, we never doubted the final objective—liberty, fraternity, and equality for everyone on the planet. Even the cynics believed in their hearts in the justice of their mission as “warrior-internationalists” in Afghanistan.’39

  For most soldiers, indeed, doubt and criticism were not an option. People have blamed the army
and its leadership for going along with the criminal policies of the political leadership, wrote General Lyakhovski. ‘But when an army begins to choose which orders it will carry out and which it will not, it ceases to be an army. It is an old truth that an army does not act in accordance with anything except its orders. It bows neither to common sense nor to necessity nor to anything else. That is what distinguishes it from any other institution. That is what makes it vulnerable.’40

  People Turn against the War—and the Army

  In 1982 a newsreader on the Soviet overseas broadcasting service called Danchev started inserting phrases into his English-language broadcasts such as ‘The people of Afghanistan are playing an important role in the struggle to defend their country against the Soviet occupiers’ and ‘The tribes living in Kandahar and Paktia provinces have joined the struggle against the Soviet invaders.’ Danchev’s words were played back into the Soviet Union by the foreign broadcasters. Surprisingly, he kept out of trouble for a year. But in May 1983 he overreached himself and attacked the Soviet invasion in three separate bulletins, one after the other. He was expelled from the Party, sacked from his job, and put into a psychiatric hospital.

  By then, however, public opinion in the Soviet Union was also turning against the war, and criticism was becoming more vocal and widespread among ordinary people. Letters were coming into Soviet Party bodies and newspapers from all over the country, especially from those who had relatives fighting in Afghanistan or who had lost them there. Shershnev did an analysis of the letters reaching Komsomolskaya Pravda which was passed on to Marshal Sokolov, the head of the Ministry of Defence’s Operational Group in Afghanistan. The analysis showed how much ordinary people knew about the war even in the first years, and how little they believed in the official propaganda about the soldiers doing their ‘international duty’, defending the April 1978 Revolution, and helping the Afghan people.

  Most of the letters were from mothers whose sons had been killed, or were serving in Afghanistan or due to be called up. Others came from soldiers’ sisters and fiancées, or from boys of military age. The letters touched on a variety of themes. There was grief for sons and contemporaries who had died in the war, and fear for those who might be sent there. Parents with only one son suffered in particular. Some correspondents roundly asserted that there was no justification for what was going on in Afghanistan: ‘The blood of our sons is being spilled in a foreign land for the interests of foreigners’; ‘He died without honour or glory in a foreign land’; ‘What right does our government have to keep our forces in Afghanistan?’ Service in Afghanistan carried no prestige: one writer compared it with being sent to forced labour in exile. Feeling against the war was growing: the Afghan Communist regime was supported by Soviet bayonets. ‘It’s their revolution, let them defend it.’ People complained about the indifference and callousness of the authorities’ attitude and the bureaucratic way they dealt with the relatives of those who had died. They made requests and suggestions for commemorating them. They complained about the inadequacy of official information: ‘How revolting it is to read the articles about Afghanistan in the newspapers, nothing but soothing rubbish!’41

  Opinion turned not only against the war, but against the soldiers who had fought in it, even though most of them had been unwilling conscripts. Stories of the brutality of the war, the massive destruction of villages, livelihoods, and civilian lives, were now becoming widespread. Few seemed to pause to think that it was unjust to blame the individuals who had been sent to fight by their political leaders in a war of intervention which by its nature was likely to be particularly atrocious. One young woman from a middle-class background first heard about the involvement of Soviet troops in Afghanistan right at the beginning, when she was in a Komsomol camp in the winter of 1980. She was fourteen at the time. She and her friends knew that they were not meant to talk about what they had heard and they did not criticise what had happened. But nobody tried to defend it either. Two years later she feared her boyfriend might get drafted and told his father, who was in the military, that the war was a crime.

  By the time she got to Moscow University in 1983 rumours were beginning to circulate about the terrible atrocities committed by Soviet soldiers. She was shocked by the story she was told by one of her fellow students, who had served in Afghanistan. A couple of shots came from a village his unit thought it had secured. By then it was dark, and instead of going into the village to find the sniper, the commander ordered it to be destroyed by artillery. The students were told that the mujahedin were using butterfly bombs supplied by the Americans to maim children, and blame the Soviet soldiers. But then in 1988 she heard on the radio that it was the Russians themselves who were using the butterfly bombs and she was sick at the thought of what was happening to the children.

  She believed that the veterans who had been through such experiences could not have remained healthy and normal people, that they all took drugs, that all they knew about was killing, that they would all end up in the Mafia or the protection business, that they would never be able to integrate back into society. At that time she felt no sympathy for them: her impression of the Afgantsy was of a dark menacing force that was beyond help and needed to be managed.

  By the late 1980s the Soviet press was full of stories about the war. For people of her education and age, who were in Moscow in good schools at that time, Afghanistan was a terrible crime, the invasion was inexcusable, and the war had to be stopped by all means. They compared it with the American war in Vietnam and the atrocities committed there. They looked for parallels in the American movies The Deer Hunter and Platoon. They were never impressed by the argument that the soldiers were only obeying orders. They found the entire concept of that war repulsive.

  In the 1990s her attitude began to change. The only two Afghan veterans she knew well were very happy and friendly and normal. One was legendary for his happy and sunny outlook and his love for life. Another chose to interrupt his studies in MGIMO, the elite Moscow State Institute for International Relations, in order to serve in a special forces unit in Afghanistan. He too was an extremely happy person, very extroverted and artistic. She understood that the soldiers in Afghanistan were ordinary boys who had had no choice but to serve when and where they did.42

  The criticism of the army’s performance in Afghanistan grew manyfold once it became possible to publish such things openly after Gorbachev introduced a measure of freedom in the Soviet press. The contrast between the feeling that they had suffered much, but done their duty, and the attitudes of indifference or even hostility that they encountered among their own people was one of the hardest things the soldiers had to bear when they eventually got home.

  The bitterness was forcefully expressed by Vladimir Plastun and Vladimir Andrianov, both of whom were in Afghanistan during the war: ‘We have to try to get at [the fundamental reasons why our policy got into a dead end in Afghanistan], even though it is painful. It is not pleasant to look at the evil you have done, even though you may have convinced yourself that you were proceeding from the best motives. But it is essential to do that, because the word “Afghanistan” will be associated for many years in the consciousness of honest Soviet citizens with the shame of the Russian people, a stain on the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the blood of our boys, and the incomprehensible tasks that were given to them (if indeed any such tasks existed), and with the hatred of those who sent us into the “Afghan quagmire” and raised up so much hatred towards us.’43

  These emotions did not swell into open anti-government protests, as feeling against the Vietnam War had done a decade earlier in America. The massive public demonstrations in the great cities of the Soviet Union still lay in the future and were directed not against the war, which by then was over, but against the fundamental tenets and pillars of the Soviet regime, the Communist Party, the secret police, the injustice, and the economic mismanagement. But they provided a political background which the country’s leaders were increasingly unabl
e to ignore as they struggled to find a way out of the mess they had got themselves into in Afghanistan.

  PART III

  The Long Goodbye

  Down from the heights which once we commanded,

  With burning feet we descend to the ground.

  Bombarded with calumny, slander and lies,

  We’re leaving, we’re leaving, we’re leaving.

  Farewell, you mountains, you know best

  What men we were in that far land;

  Now judge us fairly for what we did,

  You chair-bound critics who stayed at home.

  Farewell, you mountains, you know best

  The price we paid while we were here,

  What foes unconquered still survive;

  What friends we had to leave behind.

  Farewell, bright world, Afghanistan,

  Perhaps we should forget you now.

  But sadness grips us as we go:

  We’re leaving, we’re leaving, we’re leaving.

  Igor Morozov, May 19881

  – ELEVEN –

  Going Home

  The system in the 40th Army for bringing in new recruits and demobilising the veterans was shot through with its own rituals and conducted with that mixture of inefficiency, brutality, and creative flexibility characteristic of the Soviet system as a whole.

  As professionals, officers could usually count on getting home leave at least once during their time of service in Afghanistan. Leave was not always a satisfactory experience, even for those who could get it. Wives and other female relatives expected presents from the exotic markets of Afghanistan, which you could not always get through the customs. And the men would ask you how many people you had killed. The contrast between the reality of the fighting and the almost total inability of the civilians to understand what was really going on was sometimes too much to bear. Like British officers who came home from the trenches in France during the First World War, Soviet officers would sometimes cut short their leave in order to return to the raw but familiar simplicities of the fighting.1