Afgantsy

by Rodric Braithwaite

  The Russian Fund for Invalids of the War in Afghanistan (RFIVA) was set up in 1991. Its subsequent career was turbulent. Its chairman, Mikhail Likhodei, was assassinated in November 1994. Two years later a subsequent chairman, Sergei Trakhirov, and fourteen others were killed, and twenty-four more wounded, when a bomb exploded as they were laying a wreath at a memorial to the Afgantsy in the Kotlyarovskoe Cemetery in Moscow. The subsequent attempt to bring the perpetrators to justice was murky and only partly successful. One suspect was still standing trial in the summer of 2007.20 After these excitements the RFIVA was renamed the All Russian Social Organisation for Invalids of the War in Afghanistan (OOOIVA). Such stories were not uncommon in the Yeltsin years, when ambitious and ruthless men were fighting—literally—to the death to get their hands on the spoils of the failed Soviet state.

  The Boevoe Bratstvo, the Brotherhood of Arms, was set up under General Gromov in 1997. With close links to the authorities, it became one of the most influential veterans’ organisations in the new century. It joined the Internet age with enthusiasm, setting up its own national and regional websites, which it claimed were the largest of their kind in Russia.

  Yeltsin gave the veterans’ organisations special privileges—tax breaks, commercial privileges, customs exemptions on alcohol, tobacco, and oil products, access to foreign currency, sanatoriums, and commercial enterprises worth millions of roubles—which had become available through his policies of ‘privatisation’. Bodies such as the National Sporting Fund were similarly privileged, and the practice was one more sign of the collapse and fragmentation of the state. In effect the state handed over to the private sector its responsibilities for those who had fought in its wars. In the chaotic and corrupt conditions of the early 1990s, all this was a licence to print money. A small number of people at the top of the Afghan veterans’ organisations got very rich. Only 24 per cent—and according to some calculations, only 9 per cent—of the money actually reached the disabled ex-servicemen for whom it was intended.21

  This dubious system began to be rethought even before the explosion in the cemetery. In 1995 a revised Veterans’ Law finally awarded the Afgantsy the full status and title of ‘veterans’.22 This law gave veterans of all classes fairly broad social benefits, but unfortunately these were no more adequately funded than the benefits that preceded them. Matters were further confused by the Russian government’s decision in 2004 to convert benefits in kind—bus passes, holiday vouchers, and the like—into financial payments of dubious value in an inflating economy. The reform of local government in 2006 reallocated responsibility for the administration of benefits yet again. The rapid growth in the Russian economy after 2000 did, however, significantly improve the state’s ability to meet its financial obligations to its citizens.

  Because these veterans’ organisations saw it as one of their tasks to encourage patriotism and respect for the armed forces, especially among the young, their place in President Putin’s more assertive Russia was assured. Some of their leaders, such as Frants Klintsevich, went into national politics; by 2007 he was deputy leader of the pro-Putin United Russia faction in the Duma, and Chairman of the Duma Committee which dealt with the problems of pensioners and veterans. In the autumn of 2007 several of the veterans’ organisations supported the electoral campaign of Putin and United Russia without inhibition.23

  Soldiers returning from any war have to adjust to a world which cannot understand what they have been through, to people who have not been there, and who are not interested or interested only in a legend of heroism, rather than the traumatic reality of battle. The soldiers have seen horrible things and some of them have done horrible things. They suffer nightmares, they quarrel with their wives, they commit violence in the home and on the street, they drop to the ground at the sound of a car backfiring, they are especially haunted by the death of children.24 A month or a year may separate these reactions from the events that trigger them off. The sufferers may be able to fend off the memories by shutting down their emotions, by becoming emotionally numb. The condition may last for months or even years. Because they have been in the military, with its culture of heroism, discipline and masculine toughness, they find it hard to talk of their experiences or seek help outside their own circle of fellow veterans.25

  The suffering is not confined to those who have fought and killed. British peacekeepers in Bosnia, who fought only in self-defence if at all, showed many of the same symptoms. So do civilians who have been involved in catastrophic events—in traffic accidents, natural disasters, or as victims of violent crime. Since the 1980s, the phenomenon has been given a name: post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD.

  American studies show that 20–30 per cent of the American soldiers who had fought in the deeply unpopular Vietnam War suffered from PTSD, compared with only 15 per cent of those who fought in the first Gulf War in 1991, which was popularly perceived as just and necessary.26 American soldiers returning from the second Iraq war after 2003 were statistically at greater risk—from suicide, murder, assault, drunken driving, and drug use—than they were while they were fighting there.27

  But even when a nation believes it has embarked on a ‘just war’, the rationale fades as the carnage mounts, and the soldiers no longer fight for a cause, but to survive and to help their comrades do the same. The victorious British soldiers who came home from the Second World War were heroes in theory. In practice they were often resented by civilians who had themselves experienced real privation and the danger of violent death from the air. Jobs were scarce, or incompatible with the skills and positions that the veterans believed their service entitled them to. The divorce rate in Britain soared by fifteen times between 1935 and 1947, as couples separated by war failed to rebuild their shattered lives. Violent crime increased by two and a half times in the ten years to 1948. Sexual offences tripled. The newspapers were full of stories of soldiers murdering their wives. The veterans turned to the familiar warmth of contacts with surviving comrades, rather than family, as the first line of defence against a civilian world they perceived as unwelcoming, even hostile. As time went by, most of them slowly settled back into civilian and domestic life. Comrades drifted apart and comradeship was replaced by nostalgia for a generalised picture of a heroic war. But the symptoms could return years and even decades after peace had come. As late as 2001, one in five of the British veterans of the Second World War still displayed war-related psychological distress.28

  In Russia it was called the ‘Afghan syndrome’ and it was still around twenty years after the war had ended; in 2009 a popular song by the Siberian rock group Grazhdanskaya Oborona (Civil Defence) described the symptoms rather well.29 For the veterans of Afghanistan, the inevitable feeling of ‘them and us’ was exacerbated because many of their fellow citizens now regarded the war as dirty and unjustified. Like those who fought in Vietnam, they had found themselves fighting against an enemy often invisible and taking many forms. Now they were called baby-killers and murderers, sadists and torturers, or simpletons who had been too stupid to understand the crimes they were committing, by those who had stood aside from the horrors of a war which many of the soldiers themselves had concluded made no sense. One foreigner remembered eating in a restaurant as two perfectly sober and polite young army officers with combat decorations were chased out by the maître d’hôtel, who assured him that this was not the sort of establishment where ‘that sort’ could expect to eat.30

  These were not only the sophisticated attitudes of the urban intelligentsia in Moscow and Leningrad and the big cities. The veterans faced hostility in the small provincial towns as well. When Vitali Krivenko returned to his hometown in August 1987, people who had known him before treated him as if he was somehow abnormal. He broke with his girlfriend because she assumed he was a drug addict like everyone else who had been in Afghanistan. Drinking companions who had not been in the war would ask him if he was liable to go berserk if he took a bit too much. He learned to keep quiet about the fact that he had b
een blown up and suffered concussion when he applied for a job: employers did not like to hire Afgantsy, because they were regarded as difficult, always demanding the privileges they had been promised but had not received. He ended up briefly in prison for hitting a policeman.

  The statistics are incomplete and hard to interpret. Something can be gained from the anecdotal evidence. In 2008 Alexander Gergel found that among those who had served with him in Bakharak, one had died of drug and alcohol abuse, one had been the victim of an armed robbery, and one had become a contract killer and was serving a ten-year sentence in prison. This was not a large proportion; the remainder had more or less adapted to civilian life. ‘But after a drink or two, as the evening wore on, one realised that something had broken in the soul of almost all of us. I think one might express it this way: life had forcibly transformed us after its own pattern, and none of us had become what we would have wanted to become if we had not passed through Afghanistan. Whether we were better or worse is another story.’31

  Though there was no nationwide study, individual regions, local veterans’ organisations, and local newspapers began to set up their own websites about their young men who had served in Afghanistan. The newspaper Voronezhskaya Gazeta reported there were 5,200 Afghan veterans in Voronezh. By the summer of 1996 seventy-five had died, half as a result of accidents, one-third had been struck down by illness, and one in seven had committed suicide. Twelve years later, more than five hundred had died—one-tenth of all those who had returned from the war. The paper claimed that the young men died not so much because of what they had been through in Afghanistan, but because no provision had been made for their psychological rehabilitation, because they had been unable to afford proper medical treatment, because many of them had been unable to find work or a decent place to live.32

  But the amount of psychological rehabilitation available for the soldiers was limited partly by the lack of resources and partly because the concept of trauma was alien. If the soldiers who fought against Hitler could survive without going to the shrink, why should the Afgantsy be different? ‘Trauma’ was an alien, perhaps an American idea.

  Nevertheless, a thin but native Russian tradition did exist. The first work on soldiers suffering from psychological trauma was done in Russia after the Russo-Japanese war in 1904–5 by psychiatrists in the Academy of Military Medicine. The results were largely ignored in the Soviet period and the 40th Army took no psychiatrists with them when they went into Afghanistan. The first specialists went there in the mid-1980s. The symptoms they found among the Afgantsy were much the same as the Americans had identified after Vietnam: a sense of guilt at what they had done, a horror at what they had seen, the same self-reproach that they had survived while their comrades had died. Some specialists reckoned that as many as one in two Afghan veterans needed some sort of help. At first the symptoms were psychological: irritability, aggressiveness, insomnia, nightmares, thoughts of suicide. After five years many would be suffering from physical as well as psychological consequences: heart disease, ulcers, bronchial asthma, neurodermatitis.

  The trouble was that, compared with the United States, there were nothing like the facilities available in Russia to treat the traumatised veterans. There were only six specialised rehabilitation centres for the whole of Russia, and these had to deal with people traumatised not only by Afghanistan, but by their experiences of dealing with the nuclear accident in Chernobyl in 1986, and by the fighting in Chechnya, and other places of violent conflict.33

  One of those who tried to explain the phenomenon scientifically was Professor Mikhail Reshetnikov, the Rector of the East European Institute for Psychoanalysis in St Petersburg. He had himself been a professional military medical officer from 1972 and was posted to Afghanistan in 1986. He sent a paper to the General Staff, based on interviews with two thousand soldiers, which set out the problems from which the 40th Army was suffering: from the inadequacy of the army’s supply system to the moral and psychological training of the soldiers. The report had no effect, and he was asked by his superiors why he had deliberately set out to gather facts which brought shame on the Soviet Army. From 1988 to 1993 he directed several programmes for the Ministry of Defence on the behaviour of people affected by local wars, and man-made and natural catastrophes. After retiring from the military he became a member of the Association of Afghan Veterans.

  In an article published on the Afghan veterans’ website in 2002, Reshetnikov argued that the way Russians surrounded their military past with an aura of heroic myth had a political, a moral, and a psychological function. It helped to compensate for the horrors not only of the Afghan and Chechen wars, but of the Great Patriotic War of 1941–5 itself, the foundation event in all modern Russian patriotic myths. He wrote of some of the dreadful things which had happened in Afghanistan: the rebel sniper captured and burned alive by the soldier whose comrade he had killed, the small boy hurled from a helicopter, the young girl raped by a whole platoon, the scores of peaceful civilians shot, the villages destroyed out of revenge. His conclusions were stark. All wars lead to an ‘epidemic of amorality’, he argued. Genuine heroism and self-sacrificial comradeship do of course exist. But they are always accompanied, in all wars and in all armies, by murder, torture, cruelty to prisoners, rape, and violent looting, especially when the army is operating outside its own territory. The sense of guilt, the need to atone for what they have done, comes to the soldiers later. It affects all their personal relationships, especially within the family. ‘Their memories are poisoned by their criminal and semi-criminal experience, and they become a real threat not only to themselves but to society in general.’ Not surprisingly, his article infuriated many of the Afghan veterans who read it. They deeply resented the implication that they had all been criminals to a greater or lesser extent, and they expressed their anger in colourful terms on their website.

  The Mood Settles Down

  Attempts after 1989 by journalists and liberal politicians to get at the truth of the Afghan war produced a furious reaction not only from the veterans, but from their families as well. When Svetlana Aleksievich published her book in 1990 about the men and women who served in Afghanistan, she was overwhelmed with criticism. ‘You wanted to demonstrate the futility and wickedness of war, but you don’t realise that in doing so you insult those who took part in it, including a lot of innocent boys.’ ‘How could you? How dare you cover our boys’ graves with such dirt?… They were heroes, heroes, heroes!’ ‘My only son was killed there. The only comfort I had was that I’d raised a hero, but according to you he wasn’t a hero at all, but a murderer and aggressor.’ ‘How much longer are you going to go on describing us as mentally ill, or rapists, or junkies?’

  The veterans were particularly infuriated to be told that the war had been a ‘mistake’. ‘Why all this talk of mistakes? And do you really think that all these exposés and revelations in the press are a help? You’re depriving our youth of their heroic heritage.’ ‘I don’t want to hear about any political mistakes… Give me my legs back if it was all a mistake.’ ‘We were sent to Afghanistan by a nation which sanctioned the war,’ one woman said, ‘and returned to find that same nation had rejected it. What offends me is the way we’ve simply been erased from the public mind. What was only recently described as one’s “international duty” is now considered stupidity.’ ‘They put the blame on a few men who were already dead [Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko]. And everyone else was innocent—apart from us! Yes, we used our weapons to kill. That’s what they handed them out for. Did you expect us to come home angels?’ And more calmly: ‘Of course there were criminals, addicts and thugs. Where aren’t there? Those who fought in Afghanistan must, absolutely, be seen as victims who need psychological rehabilitation.’34

  What the veterans had found almost the hardest of all to bear was the contrast between the way they had been treated and the reception—at least as it was preserved in popular memory—which their fathers and grandfathers had received when they return
ed as heroes from their victory over Hitler. That too began to change. President Putin moved to restore a sense of pride in Russia’s history of the twentieth century, the history of the Soviet Union. There was a new emphasis on patriotism and on the glories of Russia’s military past. The war in Afghanistan began to be reinvented as a heroic episode in which the soldiers had done their military duty and defended the interests of the Motherland. On Putin’s instructions, a memorial was erected to the Warrior-Internationalists in 2004, in an alleyway of the grandiose war memorial complex commissioned by Brezhnev to stand on the Poklonnaya Gora, the shallow hill on the outskirts of Moscow where Napoleon waited in vain for the city fathers to bring him the keys of the city.35 An infantry fighting vehicle, painted in desert camouflage, was placed beside it as a modest addition to the military hardware from the Great Patriotic War which was spread across the rest of the site.

  The mood started to settle as the controversy over its causes and conduct began to die down. Russian commentators moved on from the endless argument about who was guilty for the Soviet debacle. A whole new dimension entered the discussion with the American invasion of Afghanistan at the end of 2001.36 The veterans saw the Americans mirroring their own experience and their own mistakes. There was sympathy for the soldiers fighting over the same difficult ground. There was some inevitable Schadenfreude as the NATO campaign increasingly bogged down, much tempered by the thought that it was certainly not in the Russian interest to see NATO fail and leave an unstable Afghanistan to their vulnerable south.

  The Internet

  Four or five years into the new century, another important thing happened. The veterans discovered the Internet, which was beginning to penetrate deeply into Russian society and giving a voice to people who had previously been unable to make themselves heard. The Internet enabled the veterans to bypass the official organisations and make direct contact with one another, to seek out their former comrades. They posted their memoirs, their poems, their short stories, their novels on their own site, Art of War. The quality of many of the literary contributions was high and often remarkably objective: there was comparatively little macho boasting. And the messages did not come only from the intellectuals and the educated. Many came from simple people, whose grasp of spelling and syntax was not always entirely secure. Through the Internet, the veterans began to put together lists of those they had served with, to write a first version of their regimental histories, and to organise their own reunions. Among the most active were the men from the 860th Independent Motor-rifle Regiment and the 345th Guards Independent Parachute Assault Regiment. In the summer of 2009 the veterans of the 860th Independent Motor-rifle Regiment, who by now had tracked down over two thousand of their former comrades, held their third national reunion in a sanatorium outside Moscow. It was attended by men of all ranks, some of whom had been looking for one another for two decades and more. Many brought their wives and children. Colonel Antonenko, who had once commanded the regiment, was there. So were Private Kostya Sneyerov and his commander Yuri Vygovski, who had named his son Konstantin after his former subordinate. They drank the ‘Third Toast’ in memory of those who had not returned. And they vowed to continue their meetings in future years.37