Afgantsy

by Rodric Braithwaite

  In November 1991 the journalist Vladimir Snegirev with two British colleagues, Rory Peck and Peter Joulwan, travelled from Tajikistan over the mountains to make contact with Ahmad Shah Masud, and through him with Soviet soldiers living in Afghanistan. In the course of fourteen days Snegirev managed to meet with six former Soviet soldiers. Four of them had deserted voluntarily to the mujahedin because of the treatment they had received in the army. Two had been taken prisoner. Most had converted to Islam and several had borne arms against their compatriots. Most refused to return home.12

  At the end of 1991 Andrei Kozyrev, Yeltsin’s Foreign Minister, visited Pakistan to discuss the release of prisoners.13 In March 1992 President Yeltsin (1931–2007) and President Bush established a ‘Joint Commission on POWs and MIAs [missing in action]’, partly as a result of domestic pressure inside the United States to investigate stories that US servicemen captured during the Vietnam War or even during the Second World War had been held in the Soviet Union. This commission was also given the task of establishing the fates of Soviet servicemen who had gone missing in Afghanistan. The Americans provided kits for the identification of human remains which were used, among other places, in the military morgue in Rostov-on-Don, which still contained the unidentified bodies of Russian soldiers who had died in Chechnya. After the Americans entered Afghanistan in 2001 US forces were put under standing orders to pass on any relevant information they picked up.14

  In 1998 Ruslan Aushev held talks with Masud, and his committee organised several expeditions to Pakistan and Afghanistan. The remains of four soldiers were recovered in 2003. Six more bodies were found in 2006.15 In May 2008 a further expedition made contact with five former soldiers who were still living in Afghanistan. One was Gennadi Tsevma from the Donetsk region, who was captured in 1983 and served with the mujahedin in the province of Kunduz. Two earlier attempts to persuade him to return home with his Afghan family and children had failed because he feared what might await him.16

  By the twentieth anniversary of the Soviet withdrawal, in February 2009, Aushev was able to announce that the broad figures of those still missing had been whittled down to a total of 270, of whom fifty-eight, or about one-fifth, were Muslims. Twenty-two former soldiers had been found alive and most of these had returned home to Russia or to other former Soviet republics.17

  Few Russian soldiers surrendered to the mujahedin voluntarily: their officers told them that surrender was equivalent to treason, and that they would be routinely subjected to torture if they fell into the hands of the enemy. Many preferred to destroy themselves first. But prisoners did fall into enemy hands from time to time, often because they had been wounded or otherwise incapacitated. Sometimes they were indeed killed in horrible ways. But often the mujahedin either exchanged them for men of their own in Russian or Afghan government hands, ransomed them, or used them as slaves. A number opted to go to Western countries, and their fates were naturally exploited by Western agencies as another stick with which to beat the Soviet adventure in Afghanistan. Those who did return to the Soviet Union were treated with various degrees of severity. Some were sentenced by court martial to various terms of imprisonment, though there is no record of any being shot, the punishment routinely predicted by Western propaganda. One soldier who went over to the mujahedin was exchanged for a prisoner in Soviet hands. He returned in local Afghan costume. He had not fought against his countrymen, but was sentenced to six years’ hard labour.18 Others who returned home suffered more lightly or not at all.

  Aleksei Olenin, who was serving in a transport battalion, was kidnapped as he was relieving himself by the Salang Pass. He was beaten up, tried to escape, tried to hang himself, and was finally incorporated into a mujahedin detachment led by a greybeard called Sufi Puainda Mokhmad. After two months in the mountains, Olenin converted to Islam: ‘No one made me do it. I simply realised that since I was still alive I must have been preserved by some power… I would have adopted any faith that was available: after all, up to then I had been a Young Pioneer, a Komsomol, and was preparing to join the Party.’ He was given the Muslim name Rakhmatula.

  In the course of the next six years four other Russian soldiers were brought into the detachment. One of them was Yuri Stepanov, who was renamed Mukhibullo. He too had been captured on the Salang Pass when his zastava was attacked.19

  Then the news came through that the 40th Army was leaving Afghanistan. The members of the detachment returned to their farms, and Olenin went with them: ‘In those days we grew wheat. The poppies only came with the Taliban.’ Sufi Puainda, who still regarded the Russians as his property, decided that they should all take wives. The Afghan fathers were reluctant to surrender their daughters, because the Russians could not afford the bride price, and because they feared that the girls would be dishonoured when the Russians eventually abandoned them and went home. But one poor man was willing to give Olenin his daughter Nargez. By now Olenin thought that his chances of returning home were in any case at an end.

  He was wrong. Before the marriage could take place, the Russian government had successfully negotiated for the return of prisoners. General Dostum (1954–), the Uzbek commander in the north of the country, was anxious to strengthen his relations with the Russians and arranged for Olenin and Stepanov to travel home. He first brought their mothers to meet them in his stronghold of Mazar-i Sharif. Olenin’s mother fainted when she saw him. The prisoners then left via Pakistan, where they were received by Benazir Bhutto (1953–2007): one story was that she had provided the money for their ransom. Olenin arrived back in Otradnoe in May 1994, to find a country transformed beyond his recognition by the collapse of the Soviet Union. His mother paraded the local girls before him in the hope that he would marry one of them and settle down. But his conscience weighed on him and after six months he went back to Afghanistan to find and marry Nargez. He intended to take her back to Russia. But the arrival of the Taliban in power meant that he was once again trapped in Afghanistan. His small business profited, his wife bore him a daughter, and it was not until 2004 that he finally returned again to Otradnoe, this time with his family. He remained a Muslim and the women of the village noticed that he worked harder and drank less than the other men in the village.20Musulmanin (The Muslim), a film made in 1995, explores just such a theme: the contrast between the orderly piety of a Russian Muslim convert from Afghanistan and the disorderly and dysfunctional life of the family and village he left behind him.

  Nikolai Bystrov also served with the mujahedin. He was called up in spring 1982 and posted to Bagram to patrol the airport. In the middle of 1983 he and two others went—contrary to the regulations—to a kishlak about a mile away to buy food. One of the villagers told them that their route home would be ambushed and advised them to go a different way. That was the trap: the ambush was waiting for them there. In the resulting firefight, one soldier was killed immediately. Bystrov and the other were wounded, the latter so severely that the Afghans finished him off. One or two of the Afghans were killed as well; the others took the bodies away.

  At first Bystrov was put by his captors in a house in the kishlak where he had been captured. When he tried to escape by climbing through a window, he got as far only as the next courtyard before he was caught and beaten, some of his teeth were knocked out, and some ribs were broken. There were two different mujahedin groups involved in his capture and they fought over who should keep him. Several were killed in the process. He was then taken off and marched after dark for two or three days with a gun stuck in his back. When he made another attempt to escape, they threatened to hang him; they showed him an Afghan soldier they had already hanged as an example.

  Bystrov was then taken to the small house at Badarak, in the Pandsher Valley, which was Masud’s headquarters. Everyone crowded round to look at him. Only one could speak Russian—an engineer. When Bystrov went up to greet him, Masud shook him by the hand, an unusual gesture. Masud, who knew a bit of Russian and could understand more, ate with his men and Bystrov joine
d them.

  The next night Bystrov was taken deep into the Pandsher Valley. There were two or three Russian prisoners already there: one was called Samin and another Fedorov. They made a further attempt to escape, and were put in a cell for a month. They were properly fed and treated, and began to learn the local language. A Turkmen prisoner was brought in to join them. His name was Balashin Abdullah. There was something odd about him: they were not allowed cigarettes, but he smelled of tobacco. One day they woke up and he was no longer there. He was clearly a spy. Two or three more prisoners were brought in. Later the Russian prisoners were taken to Chayavu, where Masud’s own prison was. Apparently without his knowledge they were thrown into a pit, where they spent six months. One of the Russians escaped into the mountains and was rescued by a patrol of paratroopers. When Masud turned up later, the others were moved to more decent accommodation in a stone house.

  Masud offered them a choice. They could be exchanged for mujahedin prisoners in the hands of the Russians; or they could go abroad to Pakistan and on to Switzerland, Canada, or America. Twelve prisoners left for Pakistan, but Bystrov and one other remained. All of them were afraid of what might await them if they returned to the Soviet Union; but Bystrov himself thought that going to Pakistan might be equally risky.

  Bystrov therefore accompanied Masud and his men into the mountains. While they were resting near the top of one of the mountain passes, Bystrov was given a Chinese automatic rifle and a flak jacket, and told that henceforth he would be one of Masud’s bodyguards. Bystrov could not understand why he was being shown so much trust. He checked the weapon: it was in full working order, and there was a full supply of ammunition. He could have killed Masud and the rest of the bodyguard, and taken himself off. But he decided that, since Masud had trusted him, he should stick with him. Masud was a good judge of people.

  In 1986 Bystrov married a woman from the same tribe as Masud. He remained in Masud’s bodyguard until 1995, when, on Masud’s advice, he returned to Russia with his wife to avoid the Taliban. Once the Taliban had been ejected, he began to visit Afghanistan again, to see his wife’s relatives and to search for the remains of Soviet soldiers. His method was simple: he would go to a village where there had been a fight and ask the inhabitants where they had buried the bodies. They would tell him, then he would exhume the remains and arrange for them to be returned to Russia. He became a minor celebrity in his own country, but remained a good if somewhat melancholy Muslim.21

  The Mothers

  Because no one else seemed willing to take much responsibility for the welfare of the conscript soldiers, the mothers of the soldiers in Afghanistan took matters into their own hands. Since comparatively few of the sons of the better-off and influential served there, it was the mothers of soldiers from poorer families in the towns and the country, with no experience of political life, who became an increasingly powerful force throughout the war.

  These women had to contend with a sentimental image of the soldier’s mother which had an echo in the emotions of ordinary people, but was also cultivated by the authorities because it helped to minimise trouble. On the twentieth anniversary of the withdrawal from Afghanistan one semi-official organisation offered the mothers of soldiers the following advice: ‘What can a Mother do for her soldier son? What?… Only one thing—she must wait… It is You,’ the announcement continued, ‘who bear the lofty title of “Mother of the Defenders of the Motherland” and it is You who bear the responsibility of passing on to new generations the genetic code of love for the Fatherland… It is You who feel the bitter truth and the proud memory of your sons. We congratulate You, Mothers of this great country, who wait day and night for their sons to come home. They will come back!’22

  Many mothers had little choice but to heed such condescending stuff. But others were unwilling to remain passive. They badgered the bureaucrats, protested individually, and attempted—sometimes successfully—to get to Afghanistan to see for themselves what was going on. They had four main concerns. The first was to try to prevent their sons from going there at all. The second was to protest against the abuses of dedovshchina and to minimise them where they could. The third was to discover the fate of those who had perished in Afghanistan, especially those who had gone missing in action. The fourth was to secure the return of those who had been taken prisoner. The mothers’ movement was one of the first effective civil rights movements to be organised in the Soviet Union, and gathered strength as the Soviet political system began to loosen up under Gorbachev. And after the war was over, the mothers formed themselves into more formal bodies, standing up for soldiers’ rights and helping the conscripts sent to Chechnya.

  Alla Smolina worked in the office of the military procurator in Jalalabad for nearly three years from the autumn of 1985. Her task was to manage the archives and documentation which passed through the office, and it was for the most part a depressing business. She dealt not with the records of the heroic officers and men fighting in the nearby mountains, but with the files of murderers, looters, rapists, drug addicts, deserters, self-mutilators, bullies, and thieves, complete with photographs of suicides, mutilated bodies, and mass graves. She had been present at one exhumation where among the remains there was a child’s tiny foot still in the rubber boot which had prevented it from decomposing. After a while, such things became routine, and Smolina—with some assistance from tobacco and alcohol—no longer reacted to them.

  From time to time the procurator’s office received letters from the mothers of soldiers who had fallen foul of military law. It was a strict rule that these letters should be filed away unanswered: the correct channel for enquiries about individual soldiers was through their immediate commanders. But one letter attracted Smolina’s particular attention. It was from a Ukrainian woman who had become a single mother at seventeen. She had brought up her son, Viktor, her letter said, to be a good boy, more interested in literature than in drinking and fighting with his mates. Now he had stopped writing home and his mother was determined to know what had happened to him.

  Smolina got down the file. Alas, Viktor, in despair at the bullying to which he had been subjected by the ‘grandfathers’, was under arrest for shooting himself in the legs. Military commanders usually tried to cover up such incidents by reporting them as accidents or the result of military action. But the doctors treating the victims could usually tell whether wounds had been self-inflicted or not. Once they had cured Viktor, they reported their medical findings to his commander, who placed him under arrest pending investigation.

  Then it all went wrong. A Tajik soldier threw a grenade into the sleeping tent of the soldiers who had been bullying him, took a gun from the armoury, and made off. He was soon caught and locked up in the same guardroom as Viktor. There he persuaded Viktor to escape and get to America on one of the programmes for helping Soviet deserters. They broke out successfully, were picked up by the mujahedin, and were lucky enough to survive. Viktor converted to Islam.

  At that point Smolina got another letter from Viktor’s mother. She had tried to get a job with the 40th Army. But she had failed. Now she had sold her possessions to buy an air ticket to Tashkent. From there she would wangle a lift into Afghanistan. Smolina did not tell her that Viktor was no longer in the country. She wrote urging Viktor’s mother not to move until the investigation was over.

  That was the end of the correspondence. But it was not the end of the story. Smolina picked up a rumour from some helicopter pilots that a crazy young Ukrainian woman had tried to cross the frontier to see her soldier son who was in trouble. She had smuggled herself aboard a column of vehicles preparing to leave for the south but was caught. She had cadged lifts on helicopters. She had in the end been locked up by the local military police in Termez.

  The woman in question was indeed Viktor’s mother. After the war Smolina tried but failed to track her down through official channels. Then, more than two decades later, she succeeded in reconstructing the story from scraps of information on the I
nternet. Viktor never got to America. He trained with the mujahedin in Pakistan, went back to Afghanistan, but did not actually fight against Soviet troops. He then made his way to Iran, contacted the Soviet Embassy there, and eventually returned to the Soviet Union.

  The Rising in Badaber

  Stories about Soviet defectors and former prisoners of war continued to surface for many years. An officer from the GRU is said to have deserted to the mujahedin, taking with him the names of Soviet and Afghan government agents. The mujahedin rounded up the agents and the officer helped to execute them. He then led a band of fighters against his former comrades before making his way to the West. A group of GRU officers swore to punish him. They eventually tracked him down and killed him in Poland, more than a decade after the war had ended.23 At the end of 2009 eight Soviet soldiers who had remained in Afghanistan were said to be fighting with the Taliban against the forces of the US-led coalition.24 One incident was hushed up at the time, but later became a legend: the rising on 26 and 27 April 1985 of Soviet and Afghan army prisoners of war held in the prison-fortress of Badaber, just south of Peshawar in Pakistan.

  Badaber had been home from 1958 to 1970 to a US Air Force secret intelligence listening post, the 6937th Communications Group. It was from there that secret missions were flown by U2 reconnaissance aircraft into the Soviet Union, whose frontier was only two hundred miles away. Gary Powers took off from Badaber on the ill-fated flight which ended when he was shot down on 1 May 1961 over Sverdlovsk, deep inside the Soviet Union, thus triggering off a major East–West crisis.