Afgantsy

by Rodric Braithwaite

  Demobilisation

  The conscript soldiers were not entitled to go home on leave, though they would be sent to the Soviet Union if they were sufficiently badly wounded, and could sometimes get back for compassionate reasons, such as the death of a very close family member. Their lives were subject to a different rhythm. Twice a year—usually on 27 March and 27 September—the Soviet press would carry a Prikaz, an order signed by the Minister of Defence, setting the date for the demobilisation of soldiers called up two years previously. The Prikaz for March 1985 read:

  In accordance with the Law of the USSR ‘On universal military service’, I order:

  1. Personnel who have completed the period of active military service laid down are to be released from the ranks of the Soviet army, the navy, the frontier and internal forces into the reserve in April–June 1985.

  2. In connection with the release into the reserve of military personnel, as indicated in point 1 of the present order, male citizens who have reached the age of 18 before the call-up date are to be called up for active service in the Soviet army, the navy, the frontier and internal forces, as are older citizens of military age who no longer have the right to deferment.

  3. This order is to be promulgated in all companies, batteries, squadrons, and ships.

  Minister of Defence of the USSR,

  Marshal of the Soviet Union S. Sokolov

  The long-awaited publication of this order set off a flurry of activity among those due for demobilisation. These soldiers were known in army jargon as dembels, and the process of military bureaucracy and traditional ritual which accompanied them on their departure was obscurely named the dembelski akkord, which covered the period—perhaps three months, the stodnevka, or ‘hundred days’—from the publication of the Prikaz to the date on which the soldier actually left Afghanistan.

  There was an understanding that the dembels should not be sent on dangerous operations during this period. Vitali Krivenko refers to an order to this effect by the Ministry of Defence, which he believed was a response to the letters the Ministry was receiving from the parents of soldiers who were killed on the eve of their return.2 The understanding was often breached in practice. One group due for demobilisation in February 1987 spent the two previous months on an operation, and arrived back in camp at night, unshaven and dirty, hours before they were due to leave for the Soviet Union. They managed to scrub themselves down and shave, their comrades cut their hair for them, and by the morning they were on parade by the regimental headquarters, smartened up and ready to leave.

  The rituals of departure varied. The dembel’s comrades would have a whip-round so that he could buy presents for the people back home. But there was an official rule that only goods which had been bought in the army shops could be taken back to the Soviet Union. Things bought in the Afghan shops—Japanese tape recorders, cameras, designer clothing, trainers, everything that the soldiers most wanted—risked being confiscated by the Soviet customs officials, who, the soldiers suspected, simply took them for themselves. This was true even of the modest things that were all most ordinary soldiers could afford: a scarf for one’s mother, cosmetics for one’s girlfriend, a Japanese watch, condoms, musical picture postcards, to say nothing of the pornography with which Afghanistan was by then awash. Some soldiers decided it would be simpler to buy their presents back in Tashkent. But there was a problem here too: the soldiers got hold of Afghan notes and Soviet military currency by a variety of means, most of them illegal. Rates of exchange varied and some notes had magnetic stripes which meant that their provenance could be identified. So there was a real risk that the customs officials would relieve them of their money as well.3

  Then the dembel would have to prepare his dress uniform. The less fortunate would dig out their old parade uniform, crumpled and dirty as it was, and soak it for a week in engine oil to restore the dark colour, clean it in petrol, and hang it out for a month to air. The belt would be brought to a brilliant white, its buckle to a dazzling shine, and an aiguillette braided out of parachute cord.4 Luckier soldiers might have been issued with the eksperimentalka, a new kind of uniform which was being tried out in Afghanistan from about 1985 and looked better than the standard outfit.

  The departing soldier would also put together a dembelski albom, a scrapbook covering his time in Afghanistan, full of photographs, stories, drawings, diaries, and other material. This was frowned on by the military authorities, who feared that the photographs in particular might breach security. But their attempts to suppress the practice were unsuccessful.

  On leaving their unit the departing soldiers would be addressed by the political officer, who would tell them what they could and could not talk about when they got home. The line was that the 40th Army was ‘great, powerful and morally healthy’. There was to be no mention of casualties or the brutal nature of the fighting. All photographs and films were to be destroyed. Needless to say, many soldiers ignored all these injunctions: luckily, because a great many of their photographs have survived.5

  Vitali Krivenko’s dembelski akkord lasted from May until August 1987. The convention that dembels should not go on dangerous operations was waived in his case too. He had prepared all his kit ready for departure, when his regiment was sent off in July on an operation to clear the mujahedin out of Herat. For the first time in his service, he and his company of the 12th Guards Motor-rifle Regiment were landed by helicopter in the mountains in an attempt to cut off the rebels’ line of retreat. Six men in his company were wounded and a fully loaded ambulance helicopter was shot down. Krivenko got a small piece of shrapnel in his foot: a nearby parachute captain cut it out and he was little the worse. The mujahedin withdrew in good order; so did the Russians, licking their wounds and carrying their dead. On their way back, Krivenko and his company were sent off on an unsuccessful attempt to intercept a caravan, shot up a couple of villages where the caravan might have been hiding, and got back to base on 1 August.6

  He and the four other soldiers who were due to leave were up until midnight shaving, packing, sorting out their uniform, and scurrying round the base trying to raise money. He hid his money among some sweets at the bottom of his bag, and a couple of cakes of cannabis in a box of Indian tea, and was ready for the journey.

  Next morning their officers thanked them for their service, wished them well, and sent them off by road to Shindand, and thence by air to Tashkent. There Krivenko was pleasantly surprised that the customs officials merely asked if they had any weapons or drugs; when they said, ‘No,’ they were allowed to go on their way. They were lucky. They met another group of returning soldiers who were so incensed by the behaviour of the customs officials that they refused to hand over their presents and started to smash them up instead. An ugly scene was averted only when an officer intervened and ordered the customs officials to let the goods through.

  Tashkent was seething with returning soldiers, but Krivenko and his comrades were mystified that there was no vodka to be had: they had not appreciated the impact of Gorbachev’s ban on alcohol. They made do with cannabis instead. The police and the military patrols ignored them.

  On the train, it turned out that the conductor did have vodka to sell. The soldiers settled down to drink, play their guitars, and tell their tales. The passengers at first seemed afraid of them, but then decided that they were not bloodthirsty murderers after all. There was only one unfortunate incident. As the bottles were emptied, the conductor put the price up outrageously. The soldiers went to his cabin, had a firm word with him, and relieved him of his remaining bottles. They heard no more from him and finished their journey in peace.

  Black Tulips

  The majority of those who served in Afghanistan returned home, safe, sick, wounded, or disabled. But many of them did not. The return of the dead was an altogether grimmer affair. The ultimate symbol of the war for many Russians was the Black Tulip, the big AN-12 four-engined cargo plane—the equivalent of the American Hercules—that brought the bodies of the fall
en back from Afghanistan. For decades after the war Alexander Rozenbaum’s song ‘The Black Tulip’ could still bring a Russian audience to its feet in silent homage to the dead. There were several stories about how the planes got their romantic name, none of them authenticated.

  The nightmare started back in Afghanistan, where the bodies were prepared in the regimental or divisional morgues for their journey home. The morgues were usually in tents or small huts, sometimes with a few more tents attached, on the edge of the garrison territory, under the command of a lieutenant. Inside the morgue there would be a metal table, where the corpse was be cleaned, repaired as far as possible, and dressed in its uniform. It was then placed in a zinc coffin and the lid soldered down. Marked ‘Not to be opened’, the coffin was placed in a crude wooden box, on which the name of the deceased was stencilled. The box was now ready to be loaded on to the Black Tulip.

  The temperature, the humidity, and the stench inside the morgue made the work unbearable for the young conscripts sweltering in their rubber aprons and gloves, although it had the advantage that you did not have to risk your life out on an operation. The men were perpetually drunk and lived in a world of their own. It was bad luck to cross their path if you were going out on a mission and the other soldiers avoided them. They ate at their own separate table in the canteen, glad not to get on friendly terms with men whose torn bodies they might later find themselves piecing together in the morgue.

  Indeed it was often difficult to identify the bodies, or to be sure that the right coffin had been given the right name. On his arrival in Afghanistan, Sergei Nikiforov was put in charge of a little medical unit on the strength of a half-completed medical training before the war. He was taken by the doctor, a major, to see the regimental morgue. It was a small hut surrounded by tents. The smell hit him even before he entered. Inside, two soldiers, completely drunk, were picking through a pile of body parts. Another soldier wheeled in a trolley on which there was a long tin box. The two soldiers filled the box with a collection of human bits and pieces which seemed to bear some resemblance to one another, then the box was sent off for the lid to be welded on.

  ‘How many so far?’ the major asked.

  ‘That was the twentieth. Five more to go.’

  Once outside, the major poured so much alcohol into Nikiforov that his eyes nearly popped out. ‘Don’t worry,’ said the major. ‘You’ll see worse than that before you’re finished. Try not to drink yourself to death, though you’ll find it difficult. What you’ve just seen doesn’t happen all that often. A reconnaissance patrol was ambushed, the mujahedin chopped them to pieces, put them in sacks, commandeered a lorry, and sent them back to us as a present.’7

  For the journey back to the Soviet Union, the boxes were given the neutral code name ‘Cargo 200’. Andrei Blinushov, a soldier from Ryazan in central Russia, who in later life became a writer and human rights activist, was called up in the spring of 1983 and sent off to serve in the headquarters platoon of the garrison in Izhevsk in the Urals. Late one night, some of the grandfathers were called out to pick up a ‘Cargo 200’. They barely looked up from their television sets, but delegated the task immediately to their juniors. And that was how Blinushov first came across the Black Tulip.

  He and his comrades were taken by the political officer of the HQ platoon, an apparently self-confident lieutenant, straight to the local airport and right up to a large cargo plane standing in the darkness. The hold of the Black Tulip was packed with large boxes, crudely knocked together in wood, piled three high, each with a name scribbled on it. Inside was a praporshchik, blind drunk, who ordered them to load the boxes on to their truck and take them to the city morgue.

  It was a small building and it was already full of corpses. So the boxes—by now Blinushov had gathered that they contained the bodies of soldiers who had died in Afghanistan—were piled in the corridor. No proper death certificates had been filled out before the bodies had been sealed in their zinc coffins and then cased in wood. So—without any means of checking whether the contents of the coffins matched the names on the boxes—the morgue officials solemnly wrote out the documentation without which the coffins could not be delivered for burial to the relatives of the dead.

  Even in 1983 the government was still trying to maintain the fiction that the Soviet troops were not engaged in combat, but merely fulfilling their ‘international duty’ to help the Afghan people. So the coffins were delivered to the families at dead of night. It was a futile precaution. On almost every occasion the word got out in advance, and the relatives, neighbours, and friends were already waiting when the lorry drove up, the wooden box was broken open, and the zinc coffin delivered to the family.

  That first night, Blinushov and his comrades carried the coffin—it contained the body of a helicopter pilot—up seven flights of stairs to the apartment where the man’s wife lived, white-faced, unable to cry, clutching her new baby. A neighbour came in to help find somewhere for the coffin to rest. And then the young woman started to scream.

  The soldiers somehow slid away, hurtled down the stairs, and rejoined their officer. He had been unable to face the scene and had remained in the lorry.

  As time passed, commanders in Afghanistan would sometimes allow an officer or a praporshchik to escort the body: usually it was the body of a soldier who been awarded a posthumous medal for gallantry. Cross-examining the escort was, among other things, a good way for the people back home to find out what was going on in Afghanistan.

  One young captain, a helicopter pilot, came to deliver the body of a comrade from the same squadron. He showed Blinushov photos—taken illegally, of course—of life in the field: soldiers dressed in an odd mixture of uniform and civilian clothes, and Afghan villages reduced to ruins. The young officer said that the helicopters sometimes had to attack villages when they were operating against the mujahedin. Of course women and children got killed too: he tried unconvincingly to maintain that they had been killed by the mujahedin. He was so nervous about how he would be received by his comrades’ family that he asked Blinushov—a private soldier—how he should behave.

  He was right to be worried. When he arrived at the house of the dead man with his escort—several soldiers and a praporshchik—they found an angry crowd round the house. Someone punched the praporshchik in the jaw, his lip was split, and his cap fell into a puddle. The women screamed, ‘Murderers! Who’ve you brought with you! What have you done with our boy?’ The men started to attack the soldiers as well, until the women shouted, ‘Leave them alone. They’re just as unhappy as we are. It’s not their fault!’

  The soldiers unpacked the wooden box and slowly took the coffin up into the apartment. It was crowded with relatives and neighbours, the mirrors were veiled in black, the women were wailing and the men were drunk. The captain stood awkwardly in the entrance, kneading his cap in his hands. When Blinushov told one of the women that the man had come all the way from Afghanistan to accompany his comrade, she rushed forward, saying, ‘Please, forgive us: he was our only son.’ Nervous at the prospect of being left alone, the captain tried to persuade Blinushov—they were by now on first-name terms, despite the difference in rank—to stay behind while everyone drank tea. But it was time to return to base and the soldiers left.8

  It was not only men, of course, who returned to their homes in the zinc coffins. Alla Smolina’s friend Vera Chechetova was making the short fifteen-minute flight by helicopter from her outlying base into Jalalabad when her helicopter was shot down on 14 January 1987. She had refused to wear a parachute because it wouldn’t fit and because it would have spoiled her dress. It was only by the fragments of the dress that they were able to identify her body. At least, observed Smolina, that meant that her family got the right body when the coffin was delivered to them—something that by no means always happened.9

  The Missing

  If a soldier went missing in action, his family was entitled to no support until his fate had been established. A praporshchik from the 345t
h Guards Independent Parachute Assault Regiment went missing with his BTR and a driver. The BTR was found abandoned and the driver dead, but there was no trace of the praporshchik. His wife and two children were condemned to live in poverty.10

  On the final day of the war, 15 February 1989, the Soviet military authorities had still not fully accounted for 333 soldiers who had gone missing in Afghanistan. Thirty-eight were definitely identified as having been taken prisoner. Forty-four had joined the mujahedin: seventeen of these had subsequently returned to the Soviet Union. To judge by their names, about a quarter of the missing and a quarter of those who served with the mujahedin were Muslims. Nineteen of the missing soldiers had managed to get abroad, to Canada, Switzerland, and the United States. Twenty-four were believed to be dead.11

  These figures were refined in subsequent years as the authorities continued to try to discover what had happened to their soldiers. A ‘Presidential Committee for Soldier-Internationalist Affairs’ was set up just after the attempted coup against Gorbachev in August 1991. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was jointly sponsored by all the newly independent former Soviet republics. Ruslan Aushev, who himself served in Afghanistan for four and a half years with distinction, was the first chairman of the committee, a post he still held in 2010. The committee was responsible for defending the interests of veterans of the Soviet Union’s (and later Russia’s) local wars. But one of its main priorities was to establish the fates of those who had gone missing in the Afghan war, to bring home those who had survived, and to find and return the remains of those who had perished.