Afgantsy

by Rodric Braithwaite

  In September 1990 the Soviet government agreed on the reunification of Germany. In the eyes of many officers this was a betrayal of the victory against Hitler and a sell-out by Gorbachev, Shevardnadze, and the other ‘liberals’ who were now running the Soviet government. By then the withdrawal from Eastern Europe had already begun. In autumn 1989 a British general visited a tank division in the Ukraine which was due to be disbanded. The major general commanding the division said to him in front of his brother officers: ‘Some people are beginning to say that the whole army is being thrown on the scrap heap… [pause] I agree with them.’3 Over the next couple of years nearly 500,000 soldiers and their families were withdrawn from the German Democratic Republic and the countries of Eastern Europe. The soldiers returned to poverty-stricken chaos. Many officers had nowhere to live, and had to survive with their families in tents and packing cases. The muttering among the soldiers was becoming increasingly audible. Senior officers were beginning to advise their sons not to follow them in the profession.

  The Party had always been determined to keep the army non-political by sacking (or, under Stalin, by shooting) any general they suspected of ‘Bonapartism’; and by allowing them a priority share of the country’s economic resources for the design and mass production of weapons to match those of the other superpower, the United States of America. Now things began to take an increasingly sinister turn as the army started to slip from the control of the politicians. By the autumn of 1990 Gorbachev was being noisily attacked in public and in private by the two ‘black colonels’, Alksnis and Petrushenko, who regularly accused him of outright treachery and got away with it. Party members wrote in to denounce him for betraying Eastern Europe and destroying the Soviet armed forces. In December 1990 fifty-three prominent personalities, including General Varennikov, who after Afghanistan had been appointed Commander of the Ground Forces, General Moiseev, the Chief of Staff, and Admiral Chernavin, the Commander-in-Chief of the Navy, called publicly for a state of emergency and presidential rule in conflict zones if constitutional methods proved ineffective. At the turn of the year twenty senior officers, including Akhromeev, by now a marshal, privately presented Gorbachev with an ultimatum setting out their grievances and demands.4

  All this was unprecedented: the military had never before intervened so openly in politics. But in January 1991 things moved from words to action. Thirteen people demonstrating in favour of national independence were killed by special forces troops in Vilnius, the capital of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic. The circumstances remained obscure. It was not clear how much, if anything, Gorbachev knew or approved of the action in advance. But among those who were involved in its planning and execution was General Varennikov.

  The Coup against Gorbachev

  The methods Gorbachev used to get out of Afghanistan and to pursue a more general reform may well have been the only ones likely to be effective. It was largely thanks to Gorbachev that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rebirth of Russia were accomplished with comparatively little bloodshed. But the generals never forgave him for what they saw as the treachery which had led to the destruction of a great power. They firmly regarded him and his associates as traitors pure and simple. In his memoirs, Varennikov accuses Gorbachev of cowardice, demagogy, indecisiveness, ignorance of military and economic reality, and hostility towards the armed forces and the defence industry. He and his fellow senior officers came to believe that Gorbachev was an outright traitor.5 These extreme views may have borne little relation to the facts. But what many officers saw as Gorbachev’s lack of understanding or sympathy for the fighting men and his failure to treat them with the respect they believed they had earned in Afghanistan reflected a political reality, which was to dog Gorbachev for the remainder of his time in office.

  By now Varennikov and other senior officers had had enough, and became actively involved in the attempted coup against Gorbachev in August 1991.6 On 17 August, the day before the coup itself, Varennikov attended a meeting called by Kryuchkov, the head of the KGB, to discuss what needed to be done to save the Soviet Union from political and economic collapse. Varennikov and others then flew down to the Crimea to see Gorbachev, who was on holiday there. When Varennikov told Gorbachev that, if he was not capable of running the country, he should draw the appropriate conclusion, the meeting broke up. Varennikov always regretted that no one had the necessary guts to remove Gorbachev on the spot. He himself went on to Kiev, where he tried to persuade the Ukrainian leaders to impose a state of emergency and to issue a warning that military force would be used to put down any attempt by local nationalists to exploit the situation. He failed, and much bloodshed was no doubt averted thereby.

  The next day the plotters declared a national state of emergency and moved troops into Moscow. General Lyakhovski helped draw up plans for an assault on the White House, the seat of the Russian government and its defiant president, Boris Yeltsin.7 But the coup split both the army and the KGB: many officers of both organisations were appalled by the way their former colleagues had taken arms against a legitimate government. Among the defenders of the White House were Colonel Rutskoi, the Afghan veteran decorated after being shot down over Pakistan, and veterans from the special forces in their characteristic blue and white striped T-shirts. The defenders had no more than a handful of weapons, and the assault, if it had come, would have been over very quickly. But the order was never issued and the coup collapsed. It was the Afgantsy who efficiently marshalled the funeral procession for the three young men—one of them himself a decorated Afghan veteran—who were killed in a muddled shoot-out on the second night of the coup.

  The generals too were riven by internal disagreements, and during the coup some of them found themselves on opposite sides of the barricades. The most tragic was Marshal Akhromeev. A man of high intelligence and integrity, with an ironic sense of humour, he was caught between two fires. No longer entirely trusted by his colleagues because he had done his best to serve Gorbachev as military adviser, sufficiently appalled by what was happening to his beloved military to sign the secret protest to Gorbachev at the end of 1990, he hanged himself on the collapse of the coup. Varennikov himself was arrested for his part in the coup and charged with treason. Yeltsin amnestied the plotters in February 1994. Varennikov refused to accept the amnesty, claiming that he had committed no treason: he had been defending the Soviet Union, which was the legitimate state at that time. He insisted on a trial and was acquitted.

  The generals did not forgive Gorbachev’s successor, Boris Yeltsin, any more than they forgave Gorbachev. They gritted their teeth and stormed the White House on his orders during the parliamentary rebellion of October 1993. The official figures for casualties were 187 dead and 437 wounded. Unofficial sources put the dead as high as two thousand. It was the deadliest street fighting in Moscow since 1917. The orgy of political and official corruption and profiteering which accompanied Yeltsin’s economic reforms turned many of the generals against the whole idea of liberal democracy. It was not very surprising that many welcomed the more assertive and less democratic Russia championed by Vladimir Putin when he became President in 2000.

  Now, disgusted by these events, many officers left the army altogether. They included some of the most famous soldier-bards: Viktor Kutsenko, Sergei Klimov, Vadim Dulepov, Vladimir Koshelev. One worked as a taxi driver, and when the 1991 putsch happened he drove from his Volga city to fight for Yeltsin on the barricades. Then he tried to go into commerce. But he did not like the corruption involved and went to work for the Moscow Metro instead. Another became a star of the music hall. One wrote philosophy. Another spent two years in prison for killing someone in a nightclub brawl.8 Igor Morozov resigned his commission in 1993, at the age of forty-one. He went to live in the Ryazan oblast, on the land where his father and ancestors had come from. By fair means or foul the local authority was trying to take over the land, systematically driving out people whose families had lived there for generations. All Morozov’s time
and energy now went on fighting to keep his land and his house.9

  The Fate of the Soldiers

  In the aftermath of the war in Afghanistan, the generals were sustained by their sense of military honour, and by the habits of thought of a professional life spent in the sequestered world of the military. But the conscripts who had borne the brunt of the fighting had no military tradition to fall back on. They had neither the time nor the energy to get mixed up in high politics. They were too busy trying to adapt to civilian life and to eke out a living in a country whose political and economic system had fallen apart, and whose citizens were themselves too traumatised by the collapse, and too bound up in their own struggle for everyday existence, to pay much attention to the problems of the returning soldiers.

  While a war is still going on, the soldiers are told or convince themselves that everything will be different once it is over, that they will be rewarded with jobs, and homes, and appreciation by a grateful government and people. They are almost always disappointed. Prime Minister Lloyd George campaigned in 1918 on the election promise that he would ‘make Britain a fit country for heroes to live in’.10 It did not happen. Within a couple of years, the country was hit by an economic slump which left many of them without jobs or proper homes. The victory of the Labour Party in the British election of 1945 led many soldiers to believe that this time it would be different. The new government did indeed create full employment, a tax-funded universal National Health Service, and a cradle-to-grave welfare state. But although Labour fulfilled its promises, Britain after the war was a very poor country. Housing was scarce, not least because so much had been destroyed by German bombing. The national finances were in disarray. Food rationing did not finally end until July 1954. The promises to the veterans were largely fulfilled, but at a miserable level.

  The soldiers who returned from Afghanistan were just as convinced that their government had promised them jobs, homes, medical care, benefits in kind, and cash. But because the Soviet Union was on the verge of political and economic collapse, many veterans found it hard to get even the things they were entitled to. The financial benefits were inadequate, and homes and jobs were few and far between as factories shut down and workers were laid off. Artificial limbs were crude or non-existent. So were even simple things like wheelchairs. Veterans found it hard to cope with the psychological trauma of battle, or kick the habit of drugs and violence acquired in Afghanistan. Some broke with their wives and girlfriends. Some took to crime. Most did in the end find their way back into civilian life. But all felt some sense of betrayal. ‘The boys had lived through so much over there, they’d looked death in the eye, they’d lost their friends… Then they came home to our everyday, not very cheerful life, and their raw nerves… felt all the falsehood, the hypocrisy, the indifference, the gross prosperity of some and the bitter poverty of others. And they were hurt, too, because no one cared about what they had been through, about their physical and spiritual wounds. That’s when they began to idealise the past.’11

  In February 1980, just after the war began, the government increased the wages and improved the pensions of regular soldiers and provided for the families of those who had died. It made no specific provision for conscripts. If the soldier became an invalid, he might qualify for the same benefits as an invalid from the Second World War, but by 1980 these had become quite inadequate. Otherwise he qualified only for the even less generous benefits available to those who had suffered an injury at work.

  Another decision followed two years later which specifically covered soldiers and civilians in Afghanistan and their families ‘for the successful execution of tasks set by the Government of the USSR’. It did not mention that these ‘tasks’ were military. It provided pensions, medical services, housing, transport, and so on, similar to those granted to veterans of the Second World War, though more limited in scope. There was less to these improvements than met the eye. In the first place the benefits were not at all generous. They were paid according to rank. An officer got a one-off grant equivalent to three months’ pay. A soldier who had served beyond his term got five hundred roubles. A conscript got three hundred roubles. Invalids got half that amount, but they were given a month in a sanatorium after coming out of hospital. Benefits were also set for the families of the dead, whether they were soldiers or civilians. But this was a framework decision only, and had to be supplemented with a whole raft of executive regulations. These were not published, and local authorities were often either ignorant of them or ignored them.12 So the veterans stumbled into a wall of bureaucratic confusion and obfuscation. Unhelpful officials would say, ‘It wasn’t me who sent you to Afghanistan,’ to justify their refusal to give the veterans the benefits to which they thought they were entitled.

  By now the press was weighing in openly. In 1987 Pravda wrote of the difficulties veterans faced at the hands of their fellow citizens, who themselves were short of money, proper medical care, and adequate accommodation, and saw little reason why the queues should be jumped by men who had not, after all, been fighting in a real war. An opinion poll of veterans conducted by Komsomolskaya Pravda reported that 71 per cent of the veterans thought that the benefits existed only on paper.13 The veterans still found it hard to discover their rights. And there was no coherent administrative mechanism to administer the benefits properly, no one-stop shop. The veterans had to traipse from one bureaucratic office to the next in order to get what they were entitled to.

  In February 1989 the Afgantsy were given the formal status of ‘Warrior-Internationalists’, a term first applied to the foreign volunteers who fought on the Soviet side during the civil war of 1917–23, and then to the Soviet soldiers who fought in the Spanish and Chinese civil wars, and on the side of ‘progressive’ regimes in Cuba, Korea, Angola, Ethiopia, Vietnam, and elsewhere. An appropriate campaign medal was issued. It consisted of a five-pointed star on a gold laurel wreath. In the centre was a handshake, and under it a shield, as a symbol of the defensive nature of the operation. None of this satisfied the Afgantsy, who wanted to be given the same status as veterans of the Second World War.14

  Housing was perhaps the worst nightmare of all. When a veteran killed himself because he had been unable to get anywhere to live, one of the trade union officials involved commented, ‘I understand what it was like for him. When the boys were fighting in Afghanistan they were probably promised the earth. But the factory can’t just provide an apartment at the drop of a hat. The necessary regulation doesn’t exist. And then you have to understand that we have to build the houses ourselves, and with the dreadful new accounting standards we can barely make ends meet. Sasha was the twelfth in the queue. There were veterans from the Second World War ahead of him, and Afghan veterans too, who had arrived in the factory before he got here.’15

  The Soviet Union had always been a very poor country. There had never been enough wealth to support the general promise of the country’s state welfare system to its citizens. With the best will in the world, the promise of special privileges for returning veterans could rarely be fully met in practice. One returning officer recognised the problem: ‘The country’s level of economic development set the level of social help that the state can give to the various levels of society. If we did not have a housing problem, we would not have a problem finding accommodation for the Afgantsy… It’s not a result of a lack of warmth, it’s not a result of a lack of attention, it’s the result of the problems which exist in the country.’16

  Not surprisingly, however, few veterans saw it that way. They felt that society had failed to award them even the moral recognition to which they were entitled. The promises that had been made to them were not fulfilled. They had to struggle to get the meagre benefits to which they were entitled. And some civilians grudged them even these.17

  But one way in which the treatment of the Afgantsy differed from that of the veterans of earlier wars was a direct result of the loosening of the rigid state control which had marked all public activity in t
he Soviet system. For the first time it became possible for citizens to found their own independent organisations. Towards the end of the war, a number of official and semi-official organisations were set up to help the veterans directly and to bargain with the authorities from a position of greater strength. The importance of this change should not be exaggerated. Some of the new organisations were not very efficient. Some of them were rather corrupt. It sometimes looked as if they were run not so much to benefit their members, but to bring prestige, position, and wealth to their leaders. They were often very close to the authorities.

  In 1986 the Komsomol set up a new Administration for Afghan Questions. In April 1990 the Supreme Soviet set up a Committee for Soldier-Internationalists’ Affairs: there were thirteen Afgantsy among its members.18 The Union of Veterans of Afghanistan (SVA) was set up in 1989 by Alexander Kotenov, the son of a Soviet officer who had spent four years in the Gulag. After being blown up by a mine, and disillusioned by the war, Kotenov became a military historian. By 1991 the SVA claimed to represent more than three hundred thousand Afghan veterans. Kotenov resigned in 1995 in protest against government interference in the organisation’s affairs.19

  The Russian Union of Veterans of Afghanistan (RSFA), was set up as an offshoot of the SVA in November 1990. Those present at the founding congress included General Varennikov, Vice-President Alexander Rutskoi, Metropolitan Pitirim and Chief of Staff General Moiseev. Its first chairman was Yevgeni Lyagin. He was followed at the end of 1991 by Kotenov, and then in 2001 by Frants Klintsevich, a political officer in the 345th Guards Independent Parachute Assault Regiment.