Afgantsy

The creation and deployment of the 40th Army may have been a triumph of improvisation. But there were many serious shortcomings, which might not have mattered so much if the army had been able to leave, as it had originally hoped, without much fighting and after little more than a year. But as the soldiers settled in, the weaknesses became painfully apparent: inadequate accommodation, lack of spare clothing for the troops, tasteless and unwholesome food, and primitive sanitary arrangements. Funds allocated to put things right were never forthcoming. The near collapse of the army’s health system which resulted was more damaging in its way than the effects of enemy action.

At first the new army consisted mainly of understrength units from the military districts bordering on Afghanistan. These cadre units were manned only by a core of officers and warrant officers (praporshchiki), and had to be brought up to strength with local reservists: more than fifty thousand of them—officers, sergeants, and soldiers. Many were Uzbeks and Tajiks, though contrary to what many Western observers believed the soldiers from Central Asia fought well enough against their Afghan co-religionists. About eight thousand vehicles and other equipment were commandeered from local factories and farms. Even the local taxis were pressed into service to move the soldiers forward.¹

Responsibility for managing the mobilisation fell on the Central Asian Military District, with its headquarters in Alma Ata, and on the Turkestan Military District, with its headquarters in Tashkent.² The two military districts had never attempted anything on this scale before, and the local authorities, the directors of factories and farms, the Voenkomats (recruiting offices), and the military units themselves were all unprepared for the task. In the interests of security they were told that the mobilisation was only an exercise, and so their main concern was to show how quickly they were capable of bringing units up to strength, regardless of quality. There was a serious shortage of specialists (drivers for the armoured vehicles, gunners, and so on), because the local reservists, like most Central Asian soldiers, had served in construction or motor-rifle units, where they had been unable to acquire the necessary specialist skills. Many reservists could not be found, because their names and addresses had not been properly recorded. Others produced false medical certificates or hid themselves so that they could not be served with their call-up papers. Many of the reserve officers were students: they had never actually served in the army and had no practical military skills, because they had received their training in the military faculties of their universities.

By spring 1980 the 40th Army had been brought up to a strength of about 81,000 men, of which 62,000 thousand were in front-line units, equipped with six hundred tanks, fifteen hundred infantry fighting vehicles, nearly three hundred armoured personnel carriers, nine hundred artillery pieces, and five hundred fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters. The motley collection of civilian vehicles was soon sent back to their owners, and the reservists were replaced by professional officers and conscripts. The presence of these soldiers in Afghanistan was regulated by a bilateral agreement between the two governments, which set out the facilities which would be provided to the Soviet troops, the sixteen cities where they would be stationed, and the five airports from which their aircraft would operate.³

The 40th Army eventually consisted of three motor-rifle divisions, an air-assault division, four independent motor-rifle regiments (brigades), two independent air-assault regiments (brigades), two special forces brigades, communications, intelligence, rear and repair units, and—uniquely—its own aviation corps of fighter bombers, helicopters, and transport planes, units for aircraft repair and airfield defence. At its maximum it mustered 109,000 men and women, supplemented by KGB frontier troops and specialised troops from the Ministry of the Interior. (See Annex 2, ‘Order of Battle of the 40th Army’, page 342.)

The Task

The task before the 40th Army and its commanders as they swept into Afghanistan may have seemed simple, clear, and limited. The Russians had intervened to put an end to the vicious feuding within the PDPA, and to force a radical change in the extreme and brutally counterproductive policies of the Communist government. The aim was not to take over or occupy the country. It was to secure the towns and the roads between them, and to withdraw as soon as the Afghan government and its armed forces were in a state to take over the responsibility for themselves.

This may have looked like a strategy, but it turned out to be little more than an impractical aspiration. The Russians understood well enough that the problems of Afghanistan could only be solved by political means: Andropov had after all argued right at the beginning that the regime could not be sustained with Soviet bayonets. But they also hoped that the Afghan people would in the end welcome the benefits they promised to bring: stable government, law and order, health, agricultural reform, development, education for women as well as men.

They discovered instead that most Afghans preferred their own ways, and were not going to change them at the behest of a bunch of godless foreigners and home-grown infidels. The Russians did not, and could not, address this fundamental strategic issue. The vicious civil war which greeted them had started well before they arrived and continued for seven years after they left, until it ended with the victory of the Taliban in 1996. It was a war in which loyalties were fluid and divided. Individuals and whole groups switched sides in both directions, or negotiated with one another for a ceasefire or a trade deal when the opportunity arose. Fighting and bloodshed erupted within each of the Afghan parties to the war as leaders and groupings struggled for advantage. The Russians found themselves fighting the worst kind of war, a war against an insurgency which they had not expected and for which they were not equipped or trained. All sides behaved with great brutality. There were executions, torture, and the indiscriminate destruction of civilians, their villages, and their livelihood on all sides. Like others who had entered Afghanistan before and since, the Russians were appalled at the violence and effectiveness of the opposition which faced them almost immediately and which made a mockery of their hopes.

One day, both the Russians and the Afghans knew, the Soviets would go home. The Afghans would have to go on living in the country and with one another, long after the last Russian had left. Even those Afghans who supported the Kabul government and acquiesced in the Soviet presence, or perhaps even welcomed it, had always to calculate where they would find themselves once the Soviets had departed.

And there was another fundamental weakness in the strategic thinking of the Soviet government. They had underestimated—maybe they had not even considered—the eventual unwillingness of their own people to sustain a long and apparently pointless war in a far-off country. They were never of course faced by the massive popular movement in America which opposed the war in Vietnam. But a growing disillusion inside and outside government sapped the will of the leadership to continue a war that was brutal, costly, and pointless.

These two misjudgements were sufficient to nullify the military successes of the 40th Army.

The Commanders

The 40th Army had seven commanders during its existence: Yuri Tukharinov, Boris Tkach, Viktor Yermakov, Leonid Generalov, Igor Rodionov, Viktor Dubynin, and Boris Gromov. Between 1975 and 1991 another eleven generals served as advisers to the Afghan armed forces. A number of these men, appalled by the humiliations inflicted on their army and their country, played a significant part in the politics surrounding the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the new Russia.

These men were sophisticated professionals. They had attended the Academy of the General Staff. They had managed major military formations, run military districts inside the Soviet Union, and commanded armies outside it. In 1979 they still enjoyed the reflected glory of the victory over the Germans in 1945. They were paid more than other public servants except the KGB. They shared with the political leadership the basic objective of maintaining strategic parity with the United States, and the politicians were content that they should have the first claim on the country’s economic resources, provided they kept out of politics. Like professional officers elsewhere, they had been drilled during their training with a strong sense of military honour, duty, and patriotism. They were devoted to the glories of Russian military history. They kept themselves apart from civilian life, but they were quite sure that civilians should not be allowed to meddle in any aspect of military affairs. Even the Defence Minister, Dmitri Ustinov, did not in their eyes quite fit the bill. Despite his long connection with the military, he was a Party bureaucrat, not a professional officer.

Some of these generals had seen action as junior officers in the Second World War. Many of them had served and a significant number had died in the Far East, the Middle East and Africa, where the Soviet Union had given active military support to Communist allies, to ‘progressive’ governments in the Third World, or to peoples seeking independence from their former colonial masters.⁴

The generals had successfully deployed seventeen divisions into Hungary in 1956; and eighteen divisions, backed by eight Warsaw Pact divisions, into Czechoslovakia in 1968. Eighty-seven officers and 633 soldiers died in the operations against the Hungarian rebels. There was no fighting in Czechoslovakia, and only one officer and eleven other ranks were killed there. As an exercise in logistics, these were formidable achievements. But they were not the real thing. Unlike many of their American counterparts, the Soviet generals had no recent experience of managing large numbers of troops in battle. And they did not have the equipment, the training, the doctrine, or the experience to fight a counter-insurgency war in the mountains of Afghanistan.

Although four Soviet generals perished in the fighting,⁵ the brunt was borne by colonels, majors, and captains, by young lieutenants, and of course by the ordinary soldier. Only a small proportion, less than 10 per cent, of the officers of the motor-rifle forces, the backbone of the army, went to Afghanistan. The rest were spread across the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe, ready for a major war with NATO while keeping a careful eye on the Chinese.

Most Soviet officers genuinely believed in their professional duty to carry out the orders of their government. Even had they known about them, they would not have regarded the doubts which assailed the Soviet leadership as any of their business. At least to start with, they believed that they were indeed in Afghanistan to protect it from outside interference and domestic rebellion. Even as disillusion grew towards the end, some idealism remained. Anatoli Yermolin went to Afghanistan as a young lieutenant in 1987 and was in no doubt about the value of Soviet intervention. The doubts came later, when he returned home and became a liberal politician in the post-Communist Russian parliament.⁶

By the time they arrived in Afghanistan, young men who had been through the Soviet officer schools were mostly reasonably well trained, or at least equipped to absorb the indispensable lessons they could only learn on the battlefield.

Specialists were given extra training. After finishing at the Academy, Alexander Kartsev was sent off for a year’s further training in intelligence. By then the GRU had decided that they needed better local intelligence in Afghanistan. Technical means of gaining intelligence were proving inadequate. Aerial intelligence arrived too late. Radio listening stations did not work well in the mountains. They recorded a huge number of significant conversations on to ancient tape recorders, but there were not enough qualified interpreters to process the material. One solution, the GRU decided, was to imitate the French charity Médecins Sans Frontières and give selected intelligence officers basic medical skills. They would be welcomed in the villages, where they ought to be able to pick up much useful information.

And so for two months Kartsev was trained by professors of medicine from Moscow, and learned the ‘Short Russian–Dari Phrase-book’ by heart. He was then sent off to a camp in Turkmenistan, where he learned mountaineering, shooting, mountain driving, and a bit more about the local languages. Then, after being issued with a Soviet passport and enjoying the unsympathetic attentions of the Soviet customs officials at Tashkent airport, he was posted to the 180th Motor-rifle Regiment in Kabul and served in Afghanistan from 1986 to 1988.

He was assigned to a small post west of Bagram. Here he was involved in the raids, ambushes, and house-to-house searches which were the bread-and-butter tasks of such units. In addition he used his medical skills to gain the confidence of the headmen in the nearby village, or kishlak, and provide the villagers with simple medical services which were otherwise unavailable to them. Using this as cover, he was able to pick up local intelligence, and maintain a secure link with ‘Shafi’, an Afghan agent who had studied in Oxford and Japan. Kartsev guessed that ‘Shafi’ was acting as a go-between for Ahmad Shah Masud, the mujahedin commander in the Pandsher Valley. From ‘Shafi’ Kartsev acquired an intense interest in Eastern medicine, and after he left the army he turned the knowledge he had acquired in Afghanistan to good use, setting up his own massage practice in Moscow.⁷

What Kind of a War?

Like other counter-insurgency wars, the campaign in Afghanistan was not a war of set-piece battles and great offensives, of victories, defeats, and headlong retreat, and there was no front line. In such a war, there was little scope for generalship in the normal sense of the word. Nor was it a war which lent itself to easy narrative. It was not that the generals were still fighting the Second World War, though there was an element of that too. They had thought long and hard about the conditions of modern warfare, and they believed that they had made the necessary adjustments to fight such a war and win. Their mistake was to assume that if the army was well prepared to fight a major war, it could without too much adaptation successfully fight minor wars as well. The Americans had thought the same at the beginning of the Vietnam War. They had adapted their tactics, but never cracked the problem. Even though they had that example before them, the Soviet commanders had not worked out in advance how to deal with small, lightly equipped, and highly mobile groups of strongly motivated men moving across difficult terrain with which they were intimately acquainted. Until they had gained experience the officers and men of the 40th Army were not very good at this kind of war. And even though many of them adapted well enough, they were in the end no more successful than the Americans at defeating their elusive enemy.

The country in which the 40th Army now found itself could not have been more different from the European plains for which the Soviet army had trained. It might have been specially designed for the conduct of guerrilla warfare, for mountain skirmishes, ambushes along road and tracks, punitive expeditions, occasional massive operations by thousands of Afghan and Soviet soldiers to relieve a beleaguered garrison or smoke out a rebel base, mujahedin raids on Soviet and Afghan government outposts, brief fights around villages or on the outskirts of towns, destruction, retaliation, and great brutality.

The mountains which cover four-fifths of Afghanistan sweep from the Pamirs in the east, where Tajikistan, India, Pakistan, and China join, almost to the frontier with Iran beyond Herat in the west. They divide the country from north to south, and the people into different and often hostile groupings who speak different languages, have different cultures, and for much of history had different religions as well. They are pierced by valleys and defiles, which are negotiable by people on foot: local farmers and shepherds, merchants, smugglers, travellers, tourists, hippies, and guerrilla fighters with their caravans of weapons. Proper roads are a luxury; until the twentieth century there were little more than tracks, passable enough by men and pack animals, but not at all friendly to wheeled traffic.

These mountains are hard enough to fight in at the best of times. The locals know all the paths and tracks, often cutting along the sides of precipitous mountains, easy to ambush, easy to defend, hard to find. But it is worse than that. At sixteen thousand feet, where some of the fighting took place, you can be incapacitated by altitude sickness until you become acclimatised. If you are wounded it can take as many as six of your comrades to get you down to help, often under fire.

Here even quite small numbers of determined men can hold their own against a powerful enemy column. You occupy the overlooking heights, block the front and rear of the column, and then destroy your enemy at leisure. This is what happened to the British ‘Army of the Indus’ in January 1842 on the road east from Kabul through Jalalabad to the Khyber Pass. More than a hundred years later the mujahedin would man the heights overlooking the route of the slow-moving Soviet columns, with their cumbersome lorries and their escorting tanks and personnel carriers. They would knock out the first and last vehicles with a mine or a rocket, and then systematically destroy the remainder.

But if the guerrilla tactic was simple, so was the answer, at least in theory. The British learned to adopt ‘a form of tactics then new to military science in Asia, namely the picketing of flank hills to protect a column on the march through the defiles of a mountainous terrain… [T]he Afridis [Pushtuns] still remember the occasion; it was only when [General] Pollock adopted, as they say, their own tactics, and applied them to the movements of his troops, that he became successful.’⁸ The Russians adopted the same broad tactic as they fought their convoys through the mountain passes and along the desert roads, sending special forces and paratroopers by forced march or by helicopter to occupy the heights before the mujahedin could get there and to block off their line of retreat.

Most Afghans live neither in the mountains nor in the ancient cities, but in kishlaks in the ribbon of low land which fringes the north of the country, swings southward past Herat and then round towards the east, through the desert, until it reaches the mountains again at Kandahar. This sliver of land constitutes about 15 per cent of the total area of the country. But only 6 per cent is actually farmed: livestock, wheat and cotton, fruit, nuts, melons, raisins, and of course poppies.⁹

Patches of lush green punctuate the arid landscape, a ‘flowering, fertile plain’, as the Soviet writer Alexander Prokhanov described it, ‘where settlements built of golden mud bricks spread out among the gardens and vineyards, where cool water filled the hand-made wells, where the young rice showed green in tiny, carefully cultivated fields, where flowering poppy and yellow sunflower flamed and burned’.¹⁰ Two decades later a journalist with the British soldiers in the southern province of Helmand went so far as to say, ‘The narrow strip of fertile meadows, irrigation ditches and mud-bricked compounds lining the Helmand river suggest a tranquillity unmolested by time. It can feel like Tuscany.’¹¹

The villages themselves tend to conform to a common pattern. The streets are narrow and the houses have flat roofs, with walls presenting a blank face to the outside world. They are built of mud brick; they age rapidly and it is often hard to tell how old they are. If they collapse, or are destroyed by bombing, the buildings soon melt back into the soil from which they sprang, as if they had never been. If you go there today the ravages of the war are hard to trace.

Alexander Kartsev described a typical village near his guard post: ‘The kishlak was not at all large, about ten fortified buildings and a few others built of mud bricks. The fortified buildings are striking both by their size and by their purpose. For the people of Kalashakhi the fortified buildings are ordinary dwellings, just like any other. They differ from the crowded and dirty Afghan cities completely… Walls up to six metres high, made of mud brick. More than a metre thick. Even a shell from a tank will not always pierce a wall like that. Watchtowers at the corners of the fortification two or three storeys high. On the inner side of the wall one- or two-storey dwellings of unfired brick, usually set out in the form of the [Cyrillic] letter ‘ ’. There are no buildings on the northern side. That is the coldest wall, uneconomic to heat in winter. Fuel is very hard to get here. Only one room has anything like a fireplace. People use kizyaki for fuel—dried and concentrated cow or camel dung. Only the richest can afford to use wood for heating.

‘On the ground floor you usually find the kitchen, and a kind of living room for eating and receiving guests where the floor is covered with matting or sometimes with carpets. A few other rooms are joined to the guest room: people live here in the summer, because the mud brick walls keep out the exhausting heat.

‘On the first floor are the rooms where people sleep and live in the winter. These are usually situated immediately above the kitchen, where there is an open stove for the preparation of food. There is no chimney. Instead a number of small holes in all the internal walls distribute the warm air through the rooms. The houses are like a large and living organism. It is not surprising that the Afghans are so warmly attached to them. In the far corner of the fortress is an enclosure for the cattle. Not far from the kitchen is a large well, called a kyariz… The fortress covers an area of not less than 400 square metres. It is inhabited, usually, by only one family.’¹²

The Soviet soldiers—and the British soldiers who came after them—called the cultivated land around the villages the ‘green zone’, the zelenka in Russian. Despite its beguiling appearance, the green zone was in many ways an even worse place to fight than the mountains. The farmland and vineyards were irrigated with water from springs and rivers, distributed through a delicate and complicated system of surface ditches and underground tunnels punctuated by vertical shafts. Lounging along the roadside there were always men in shirts and long Afghan robes, in turbans and local headgear, armed to the teeth; and there was no way that the soldiers could tell whether they were part of the local self-defence organisation, or mujahedin waiting for a juicy target—or both.¹³

These villages, into which guerrilla fighters could infiltrate, catch their enemies unawares, and then disappear back down the tunnels to evade retaliation, where every house and road might be booby-trapped, where peaceful civilians could suddenly become concealed enemies, were a nightmare for the Russian soldiers. In one incident a reconnaissance battalion incautiously entered a village in the green zone. They emerged two hours later, having lost twenty-five dead and forty-eight wounded. Such incidents were almost always the avoidable result of stupid and undisciplined behaviour.¹⁴

Although the fighting was messy, piecemeal and confused, the main objective of each side was simple enough: to stifle the supply routes of the other. The Russians brought in all their fuel, their equipment, their ammunition, and much of their food by lorry from the Soviet Union. The mujahedin got most of their weapons, ammunition, and other military supplies over the mountains from Pakistan.

Because it was a battle for roads and tracks and mountain pathways, both the Russians and the rebels used mines in very large numbers and with little discrimination. But in an asymmetrical war mines, booby traps, and roadside bombs are the preferred weapon of the weaker side, and can have a devastating effect on the morale of the stronger, as the Americans discovered in Vietnam. The rebels’ mines came from a wide variety of sources—America, Britain, Italy, China—and they also improvised their own. The largest mines could destroy a tank or an infantry fighting vehicle. The smallest could blow off a foot. The Russians used flail tanks to clear the roads. Sappers used trained dogs, probed for mines by hand—it was no good using a metal detector because the mujahedin often used plastic mines—and defused them, as columns and raiding parties followed at a snail’s pace. As they said, a sapper only ever makes one mistake.

For their part the Russians set mines in a protective belt round their own positions, and along routes and mountain tracks used by the rebels. In principle they kept proper maps of the places where they had sown their mines. In practice maps were inaccurate, got lost, or were never made in the first place, and so the Russians were sometimes blown up on their own mines. The rebels did not bother to make maps.

It was not for nothing that the Russians called it a ‘war of mines’: Afghanistan remains littered with mines sown by all parties both to the Soviet war and to the civil war which followed. There are still casualties as old mines are set off by children playing and by peasants working their fields.

The mujahedin avoided pitched battles and struck from ambush where they had the advantage. Occasionally they went further, attacked garrisons and airbases, and tried towards the end of the war to capture towns. But the Soviet convoys went on running, the main roads remained open, and no town of any consequence fell to the mujahedin while the Russians were still in Afghanistan.

For their part the Russians raided villages suspected of harbouring rebels, struck into the mountains to destroy their bases and disperse their men, mounted counter-ambushes, and mined the routes along which the mujahedin moved. Their operations were supported by transport and battle helicopters, by artillery, by fighter bombers under the command of the 40th Army, and by long-range bombers from the Soviet Union. Quite junior officers—lieutenants and captains in charge of guard posts—could call down artillery support if they needed it. The inevitable result was a heavy loss of life and property among the civilian population.

But to confront the mujahedin and their unorthodox methods of fighting effectively, special skills and special tactics and special troops were needed, troops that could operate in the mountains to ambush and counter-ambush the guerrilla bands, and to cut the routes taken by their caravans. Although the ordinary motor-rifle units took regular part in such operations, the main brunt of the fighting inevitably fell on the elite special and parachute units, and on the reconnaissance battalions and companies in the motor-rifle divisions and regiments. These troops fought very effectively, both in the high mountains and in the green zone. They made up some 20 per cent of the total strength of the 40th Army: according to some calculations, of the 133 battalions in the 40th Army, only fifty-one took part regularly in operations. The rest spent much of their time in their garrisons or escorting convoys.¹⁵

In addition to these regular army units there were a number of special forces teams set up by the GRU, the KGB, and the Ministry of the Interior. Of these the GRU special forces teams were the most substantial. A ‘special forces group’ was set up in 1985 which eventually consisted of two brigades, each of eight battalions, an independent company, an independent reconnaissance battalion, four regimental reconnaissance companies, nine reconnaissance platoons, and thirteen other units, a total of three thousand men in all. The 15th Brigade was stationed in Jalalabad and the 22nd Brigade in Asadabad in Kunar province on the Pakistani border. The 22nd Brigade was pulled out in the summer of 1988 as the 40th Army began its withdrawal. The 15th Brigade remained behind to cover the final stage of the withdrawal in February 1989.¹⁶

The main purpose of the GRU special forces units was to block the supply routes of the mujahedin through the mountains. They acquired a formidable reputation as they became increasingly well trained and equipped to fight their elusive enemy. Enduring extreme heat and cold in the harsh Afghan climate, suffering from altitude sickness in the high mountains, backed by helicopters and attack aircraft, they ambushed the guerrillas or were ambushed in their turn, and they did what they could to stop the caravans with military supplies streaming in from CIA and Pakistani bases across the frontier. They achieved some impressive results: in one action in May 1987 they destroyed a large caravan, killed 187 mujahedin, and captured a considerable amount of equipment and ammunition. But in spite of all their efforts, and those of the other elite troops, they succeeded in intercepting barely 15–20 per cent of the mujahedin caravans.¹⁷ No more than the mujahedin did they succeed in their prime purpose: to block their enemies’ supply routes.

The Problem of Intelligence

The KGB and MVD (Interior Ministry) teams were much smaller, and their prime job was to gather intelligence—to build networks of agents among the mujahedin, to study the tribal and clan relationships in their area of operations, and to discover the whereabouts of mujahedin bases, supply routes, and arms dumps. They were also given the task of hunting down and capturing—dead or alive—foreign advisers attached to the mujahedin; persuading mujahedin commanders to bring their bands over to the government side; and sowing dissension between bands so that they fought one another instead of the Russians—the tactic adopted by Rudyard Kipling’s hero on the Khyber Pass in the last chapter of Stalky & Co.¹⁸ Of course the Afghans were playing a similar game, and fed the Russians with false information to provoke operations against their own personal or tribal enemies.

The KGB’s teams formed part of an organisation called Kaskad, which Andropov set up in the summer of 1980.¹⁹ It consisted of about a thousand KGB special forces officers, stationed in eight different places throughout Afghanistan. They were not permitted to take part in routine military operations; they were too valuable to lose. The officers called themselves ‘Kaskadery’, from the French cascadeur, a stuntman. Kaskad remained in Afghanistan for three years. It was then replaced by a similar group, Omega, which itself left Afghanistan after a year. But many individual officers remained, attached to various special forces until the end of the war.

The code name for the Interior Ministry’s teams was Kobalt. The Kobalt officers were mostly from the ministry’s criminal investigation department, skilled at manhunting villains across the Soviet Union. Their job was to assist the Afghan secret police, the KhAD (Khadamate Etela’at-e Dawlati, the State Information Agency) in tracking down mujahedin leaders. They too were supposed to keep clear of regular military operations. There were twenty-three Kobalt teams in Afghanistan, each consisting of up to seven men, with a BTR (armoured personnel carrier) and a radio.²⁰

A surprising number of the officers in these small units barely knew the local languages and had to rely on interpreters, often Central Asian soldiers from the nearest Soviet unit. As one of them said, this was inconvenient if you were trying to interrogate a prisoner. Some of them were later withdrawn for two years’ intensive language training and then sent back to Afghanistan. The teams were also very thin on the ground. Zabol province shared forty miles of open border with Pakistan, across which passed seven caravan supply routes. Even after 200,000 people had left as refugees, there were still 150,000 living there, divided among seventeen tribes and ethnic groups, mostly Pushtuns. There were 145 mujahedin bands in the province, about two–three thousand men in all. They attacked pro-government kishlaks, collected tribute from the locals, mined the Kabul–Kandahar road, and carried out terrorist attacks. The KGB had twenty-eight officers for the whole province. The Kobalt team consisted of five officers and three frontier guards. There were only twenty-seven KhAD officers to support them, out of a nominal establishment of just under five hundred. There were eighty Tsarandoi—gendarmes—but they were local men, and their loyalties were suspect.²¹

The problem of intelligence and security bedevilled the 40th Army throughout the war. Their intelligence officers sought the cooperation of local tribal leaders, offering them safety from military operations, paying them subsidies, giving them food, medicine, military advice, and equipment, in exchange for their agreement to prevent ambushes, mines, and the movement of mujahedin caravans within the area they controlled. They successfully recruited agents among the villagers to report on the movements and intentions of the mujahedin. But the local leaders were under equal pressure from the mujahedin and the agreements would break down. The agents were very often illiterate, unable to read maps, and reported gossip as fact. Their handlers had to deal with them face to face, with all the risks that entailed, instead of communicating with them by secret means.²² Double and triple agents abounded. It was not unknown for rival agencies on the Russian side—the KGB and the GRU—to employ the same agent unwittingly, paying him twice for the same piece of dubious information. The mujahedin kept their own agents around Soviet bases and along their routes of march, and reported all Soviet troop movements to their principals immediately. Because the Afghan army and police were so heavily penetrated by agents of the mujahedin, the Russians only informed their allies of the objectives of joint operations at the very last minute; or they would issue them with deliberately misleading operational plans, which would be modified only when the operation was already under way. Naturally enough, the Afghans blamed their Russian advisers when things went wrong.

Allies

Fighting alongside the 40th Army were the Afghan government forces. On paper at least these were formidable. At the time of the invasion in 1979, the Afghans had ten divisions, and were armed with modern—if not the most modern—Soviet weapons: aircraft, tanks, and artillery.²³ By the end of the war the army had grown to twelve divisions, and a number of specialised brigades and smaller units. The air force had seven air regiments, with thirty fighters, more than seventy fighter bombers, fifty bombers, seventy-six helicopters, and forty transport aircraft. Many of the officers spoke Russian and had been well trained in the Soviet Union.²⁴

But there were serious weaknesses. Units were often reluctant to fight, although they did better if they were backed by Soviet units. Most were well below their nominal strength: an Afghan division might consist of no more than a thousand men, a tenth of what it should have been. The loyalty of the officers was suspect. In what amounted to a continual purge, both Amin and Babrak Karmal systematically moved or got rid of officers whose loyalty they questioned. Many deserted to the mujahedin. Badly paid and barely trained, with little reason to be loyal to Kabul, the soldiers deserted too: most went back to their villages, some to join the rebels. At first whole units defected: two brigades from the 9th Division in Kunar province; three battalions from the 11th Division at Jalalabad in the south; a brigade in Badakhshan in the north-east.

By 1980 the numbers in the army had fallen to 25,000. To stem the haemorrhage, the government lowered the age of conscription; press-ganged reluctant conscripts by force; increased the length of service to three years; and mobilised reservists under thirty-nine. After 1980 few units defected en masse; the number of individual desertions somewhat declined; and overall numbers increased, nominally at least: to 40,000 by 1982 and to 150,000 by the eve of the Soviet withdrawal at the beginning of 1989.²⁵ The rule of thumb was that if the desertion rate was no more than about 30 per cent a year you were all right. If it went much above that you were in trouble, sixty per cent was bad news.²⁶

To maintain the numbers at something like a reasonable level, the 40th Army engaged in so-called ‘operative measures in support of the recruitment of volunteers into the People’s Army of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan’. The Russian soldiers loved these operations. You drove instead of marching, there was hardly ever any shooting, you didn’t have to go up into the mountains, and the operations took place in comparatively peaceful areas: after all, you could hardly recruit government soldiers in villages that were committed to the mujahedin. Moreover, there were always plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables to be had, livestock to be ‘liberated’, marijuana to be picked up, a whole month free of routine duty. On these occasions the riflemen were accompanied by a detachment of Tsarandoi and the local ‘officer’s battalion’ of the KhAD, most of whom had been trained in the Soviet Union.

The press gangs went out twice a year, a month after the spring sowing and a month after the autumn harvest. Afghan conscripts had to serve twice: three years in the first instance. Then they got two years’ leave. If by then they had not produced a family (and that meant assembling the bride price, which not everyone could do in the time), they would be recalled for another four years.

The ‘volunteers’ were rounded up in the following fashion. An armoured column would blockade a kishlak. The infantry would go in, accompanied by Afghan special forces, and the inhabitants would be collected on the main square in front of the mosque. All men liable to conscription—and some who weren’t—would be herded off under guard to the nearest Afghan army barracks. The process would be repeated in another kishlak the following day.

At the barracks, men’s heads would be shaved (contrary to the religious beliefs of many of them), they would get rudimentary training in the use of their weapons, and they were given severe warnings about what would happen to them if they disobeyed orders. Within six months two-thirds of them had deserted with their weapons, often to the mujahedin. Sometimes they would return: some Afghan soldiers changed sides as many as seven times. By the spring of 1984 the men in the villages had learned to take to the hills for a month in the spring and the autumn. Recruitment rates fell alarmingly, the press gangs met with increased opposition, and the process lost much of its attraction.²⁷

An unsurprising consequence was that the Afghan units were unreliable in action: if there were real trouble, the Afghan soldiers would often simply get up and leave the scene. The only Afghan troops that could be relied on were the KhAD: they could expect no quarter if they were captured and so they had nothing to lose.

Most of the Soviet soldiers despised their Afghan allies, and wondered why they fought so badly when the same Afghans fought so well with the mujahedin. But General Kutsenko, who served as an adviser to the Afghan army from September 1984 to September 1987, thought that it had been underestimated: ‘By the time I arrived in Afghanistan the Afghan army had been more or less fully reconstructed. Their officers were not bad and they were well armed.’ In his view the Afghan military should have been allowed to manage their own affairs. ‘The Soviet military served only two years and were then replaced. Few of them learned the customs of the local tribes. But the Afghan commanders had been fighting for five to eight years and they well understood the psychology of their people. Our strategists nevertheless decided that the Soviet and the Afghan forces should fight side by side. The result was endless rows and buck-passing when things went wrong. Soviet officers began to say that if the Afghan forces did not want to fight the mujahedin, why should they be doing so?’ Kutsenko, who was also a ‘bard’, one of many soldiers in the 40th Army who composed songs about the war, wondered, ‘Perhaps that was why defeatist songs began to circulate in the period 1984 to 1987, especially among the soldiers.’²⁸

The KhAD was brutally efficient. It worked closely with Soviet KGB advisers and the Soviet military both in Kabul and on the ground. Between 1980 and 1989 about thirty thousand Afghan security officers were trained by the Soviets in Kabul and in Moscow and other Soviet cities, either on short courses of two to six months, or in special institutes for up to two years.²⁹ Under different names the KhAD continued to operate until the Taliban took Kabul in 1996. It was re-established by President Karzai (1957–) under another name in 2001.

The KhAD succeeded in penetrating the mujahedin inside Afghanistan and their organisations back in Pakistan. But the mujahedin also had substantial success in penetrating the KhAD and the army. In May 1985 the head of the intelligence department of the Afghan General Staff, General Khalil, was arrested with ten of his officers and eight others. He was accused of running a spy network on behalf of Masud, who claimed that no operation had ever been mounted against him without his agents warning him of it in advance.³⁰

The Four Phases of the War

The war is usually divided into four distinct phases. The first lasted from December 1979 to February 1980, and covered the initial deployment of the Soviet forces throughout the country.

The original Rules of Engagement permitted the Soviet soldiers only to return fire if attacked, or to liberate Soviet advisers captured by the insurgents. But casualties began to mount from the very start. The first ambush took place soon after the soldiers had arrived. In mid-January an Afghan artillery unit mutinied and its three Soviet advisers were unpleasantly murdered. The Afghans asked the Russians for help. About a hundred Afghans were killed, for the loss of two Soviet soldiers.³¹

A major demonstration broke out in Kabul on 21 February: some three hundred thousand people are said to have come on to the streets, shouting anti-government and anti-Soviet slogans. The demonstrations continued the following day, the largest protest ever seen in the capital provoked, the Russians believed, by agents from outside the country, including an alleged CIA officer, Robert Lee. The demonstrators filled the main roads and the squares, and marched on the Arg, where Karmal was now in residence. Administrative buildings were besieged, the Soviet Embassy was bombarded, and several Soviet citizens were killed. Shops were looted, cars were destroyed, and a major hotel was set on fire. Casualties began to rise among the civilian population. General Tukharinov, the commander of the 40th Army, was ordered to block the main approaches to the city and the demonstrations were brought under control.

But it was a turning point. Moscow ordered the 40th Army to ‘begin active operations together with the Afghan army to defeat the detachments of the armed opposition.’³² The Russians launched their first major operation in Kunar province, on the frontier with Pakistan, in March.³³ Even during this first period the 40th Army lost 245 soldiers, an average of 123 a month.

Soviet columns were already being attacked on the main supply roads from the Soviet Union. In response the Russians set up a system of mutually supporting guard posts (zastavas) at regular intervals along the main roads, around the major cities and around airports, observing the movements of the mujahedin, watching over electric power stations and pipelines, escorting convoys, and if necessary calling in an air or artillery strike as backup. There were 862 of them spread throughout the country, manned by over twenty thousand men, a substantial proportion of the 40th Army’s strength.

These guard posts where among the most distinctive features of the war. Some were very small—no more than a dozen soldiers. The men in these tiny garrisons might remain there, unrelieved, for as long as eighteen months. Some were perched in inaccessible places, on heights overlooking Afghan villages or supply routes, where they could only be supplied by helicopter. They were regularly attacked: in the eight months between January and August 1987 three zastava commanders and seventy-two men were killed; and 283 were wounded.³⁴ But none of these zastavas was ever captured; they survived, not so much by force of arms, which in the long run would have been impossible, but because their little garrisons took care to be on reasonable terms with the people in the surrounding villages.

But life in a zastava was a monotonous and exhausting business. Poor food and water, little entertainment apart from the obligatory Lenin room and perhaps a television, and the ever present threat of disease or an enemy attack wore them down morally, physically, and psychologically.³⁵ They survived, where Western soldiers might not have done perhaps, some of them said, because most of them came from hard lives and cramped quarters back in their own homes in the Soviet Union. The enforced intimacy in a small guard post for months at a time was no worse than the enforced intimacy of life in a communal flat.

General Valentin Varennikov, a veteran of Stalingrad and a ruthless, wilful, and controversial figure, had by now succeeded Sokolov as Head of the Ministry of Defence’s Operational Group. He visited one zastava perched on the top of a mountain close to Kabul, which was part of the city’s outer defences. ‘[T]he helicopter made one and then another circle above the zastava and then cautiously began to lower itself with one wheel of the chassis on to the tiny landing strip, which was about 1.5m by 4m. When the wheel touched the stone, the three of us jumped out and the helicopter flew off…

‘The territory of the zastava was shaped like an irregular rectangle. On three sides it was surrounded by a solid wall of sandbags brought in by helicopter. There was no fourth wall, because it was here the helicopter would touch down with one “foot” on the land. There were two heavy DShK machine guns at either end of this square, which was about six square metres in area. Steps led down to a little square below. Here there was a 120mm mortar, with a mountain of shells piled up beside it, and a shelter from the weather.

‘From the little square, a path ran downwards at about 45°, a set of steps hacked out of the granite rock, on both sides of which was stretched a stout rope instead of banisters. At the bottom there was another little square, about the same size as the one above. Here there was another heavy machine gun and this was where the tiny garrison—12 men in all—had their living: a place to relax, a kitchen, somewhere to wash and so on, the furniture—chairs, tables, sleeping places—all made out of ammunition boxes.’³⁶

The second phase of the war lasted from March 1980 to April 1985. Both sides learned to improve their tactics. After getting a bloody nose in direct confrontations with the Russians, the mujahedin adopted the classic tactics of the guerrilla: hit and run, ambush, booby trap. In the summer of 1980 a band based only four miles from Kabul succeeded in bombarding the headquarters of the 40th Army in Amin’s old palace, now repaired after the damage that had been done to it during the fighting in December.³⁷ With the launching of the first large-scale operation in the Pandsher Valley in April 1980 the Soviet Union stepped deep into the quagmire. Other major operations followed, on a scale which the Soviet army had not experienced since the Second World War. In August the Reconnaissance Battalion of the 201st Motor-rifle Division was ambushed on the border with Tajikistan at Kishim and lost forty-five men. Delegations from the Soviet Union began to arrive to see for themselves what was going on. So did the first concert parties to entertain the troops. It was in this phase that the Soviets suffered most of their casualties: 9,175 killed, an average of 148 a month.

The third phase lasted from May 1985 to the end of 1986. Gorbachev began active negotiations to bring the soldiers home and there was a deliberate effort to reduce casualties in what was becoming an increasingly unpopular war. The Soviet forces sought to confine themselves to air and artillery operations in support of the Afghan forces, although motor-rifle units were primarily used to back up the operations and the fighting morale of their Afghan allies. The special forces—the SpetsNaz and reconnaissance units—concentrated on attempting to prevent supplies of weapons and ammunition reaching the rebels from abroad. But even these support operations could involve very serious and costly fighting: 2,745 soldiers were killed during this period, an average of 137 a month—a decline, but not a substantial one. The Soviet withdrawal began during this third phase, when six Soviet regiments were brought home in the summer of 1986; a net reduction of fifteen thousand troops.³⁸

It was in this phase that mujahedin cross-border raids into the Soviet Union instigated by the Pakistanis reached their height. These did little damage. But the Americans worried that they might provoke a disproportionate Soviet response. Indeed when a raiding party penetrated more than twelve miles north of the Amu Darya river and struck a factory with rockets in April 1987, the Soviet Ambassador in Islamabad stormed into the Foreign Ministry to warn that further attacks would have severe consequences, and the raids were called off.³⁹

The fourth and final phase of the war began in November 1986 with the installation by the Russians of a new Afghan president, Mohamed Najibullah, to replace Babrak Karmal. With active Russian support, Najibullah launched a Policy of National Reconciliation, which was intended to reach out to moderate non-Communist political and religious leaders, while building up the Afghan army and security forces so that Soviet military support could eventually be dispensed with.

The Soviet forces continued to support the operations of the Afghan army. But the Soviet commanders were now determined to keep their casualties to a minimum and made greater use of long-range bombers flying secret missions from the Soviet Union, missions which for cover purposes were attributed to the Afghan air force. In one incident near the end of the war, a heavy bomb dropped from a long-range bomber landed close to an Afghan military headquarters, and another killed several dozen civilians. Fragments of the bomb were discovered in the wreckage, the Afghans complained, and the Soviets set up a commission of inquiry. But the incident was hushed up and no one was punished. The bombers attempted to suppress mujahedin positions in the areas around Faisabad, Jalalabad and Kandahar which the 40th Army had already abandoned. They ineffectively attacked the mujahedin rocket batteries which were now shelling Kabul with greatly increased frequency. In the very last weeks of the war they bombarded Masud’s positions in the Pandsher Valley. The purpose of this so-called Operation Typhoon was political rather than military.⁴⁰

But most of the energies of the 40th Army were confined to preparing and then executing their final withdrawal from the country in February 1989. The withdrawal took place in two stages, between May and August 1988 and between November and February 1989. It was accomplished with the same logistical skill that the Russians had shown when they first entered the country. During this period 2,262 soldiers were killed, an average of eighty-seven a month.

The withdrawal was not seriously opposed by the rebels, who by then were much more concerned with jostling for power in the new Afghanistan. The resulting civil war was, at least for Kabul, more destructive than anything that had happened during the Soviet war.⁴¹

General Lyakhovski, the indefatigable Russian chronicler of the war, paints a devastating picture of the 40th Army’s performance. Until the middle of 1980, he says, the troops were hidebound by orthodoxy, sticking close to their armoured vehicles in the valley roads. Later their performance improved, but even so many problems remained unsolved. Units were understrength, and the need to remain alert against mujahedin attacks by day or night led to physical exhaustion and low morale. The soldiers lacked stamina. They were poorly trained. Their personal equipment was inadequate. Junior commanders were careless about security and intelligence, and tactically inept, so that even when they got them at a disadvantage, the rebels were too often able to break out. Lyakhovski’s devastating conclusion was that the Soviet Union’s comparative failure in Afghanistan, its first war since the Second World War, demonstrated its weakness, robbed it of confidence in its own strength, and dispelled the myth of its military invincibility.⁴²

This is not entirely fair. Despite the criticisms levelled against the soldiers of the 40th Army, the best of them became formidable fighting men, respected and feared by their enemy. The troops from the elite parachute and special services units were increasingly well trained and equipped to fight their elusive enemy. Edward Girardet, who spent much time with the mujahedin, reported, ‘The special troops are swift, silent and deadly. Swooping down in a single December [1985] raid, they slaughtered 82 guerrillas and wounded 60 more.’⁴³ A mujahedin commander, Amin Wardak, described the ambush: ‘They attacked at night in a narrow gorge. At first, we didn’t know we were being shot at because of the silencers. Then our people began falling.’⁴⁴

The 40th Army was unique in its composition. ‘Never before in the history of the Soviet armed forces,’ said its last commander, General Gromov, ‘had an army had its own air force. It was particularly well supplied with special forces units—eight battalions in all, alongside the highly trained air assault and reconnaissance units.’⁴⁵ It was unique, too, in the task it was set. Unlike some Western armies, no other Soviet army was ever asked to fight an extended counter-insurgency war in a foreign country. The 40th Army was disbanded as soon as the war was over. It had won all its major battles and never lost a post to the enemy: a record which consoled its commanders. But it was never able to deliver the political success which the leaders of the country had hoped for.

Even before the troops had crossed the Amu Darya, an army of Soviet advisers had preceded them to try to build ‘socialism’ there, as other foreigners were later to try to build ‘democracy’.

The United States, the Soviet Union, Germany and others all gave aid to Afghanistan before the war. The Russians had the advantage of a direct model on which to base themselves: the Central Asian republics of the Soviet Union, to which in the course of a hundred years of imperial rule they had brought law and order, clean water, health care, universal education for boys and girls, economic development, and for the elite the prospect of glittering prizes in Moscow. This progress was achieved at a very high price: a protracted guerrilla war in the 1920s, perhaps a million dead in the collectivisation of Kazakhstan in the 1930s, widespread corruption, and political repression sometimes even more ruthless than elsewhere in the Soviet Union. Nevertheless one American scholar judged in 1982: ‘The Soviet leadership can legitimately claim to have a developmental model that has managed to achieve one of the highest rates of literacy, the best health care system, and the highest general standard of living found anywhere in the Muslim world.’¹ Even though the extreme measures of the 1920s and 1930s could no longer be applied, there seemed few intrinsic reasons why what had worked in Central Asia should not work in Afghanistan too.

Aid Projects

According to Soviet figures, which are neither systematic nor coherent, Soviet aid to Afghanistan between 1954 and 1980 amounted to 1.5 billion roubles. The Russians built power stations, irrigation systems, factories, natural gas wells, and the silo which remained long after the war as one of the sights of Kabul. Many of these were operated with the assistance of Soviet specialists. In addition to army and air-force officers, the Soviets trained labourers, technicians, and engineers—over seventy thousand by 1980, according to Soviet government figures. In 1979 and 1980 the Russians provided 500 million roubles of economic aid to the Afghans: credits, grants, vehicles, fuel, and support for agriculture. In February 1987 they provided 950 million roubles in grant aid, to sweeten the prospect of their eventual withdrawal. Aid to Afghanistan constituted a significant, though not overwhelming, portion of the Soviet aid given to the Third World at this time—estimated at $78 billion between 1982 and 1986. Taken together, aid to the Afghan military and the expenses associated with the Soviet military effort amounted to 1,578.5 million roubles in 1984, 2,623.8 in 1985, 3,197.4 in 1986, and 4,116 in 1987, or roughly $7.5 billion over the four years. By comparison, the entire Soviet military budget as late as 1989 was $128 billion. Similarly, according to Russian government records, Afghanistan’s debt to the USSR by October 1991 was 4.7 billion roubles, roughly half of India’s, and about a tenth of the total debt owed to the Soviet Union by all developing countries.²

Once the war started the Russians made every effort to keep existing projects going, often at considerable risk to the Soviet specialists involved. The major irrigation project outside Jalalabad employed about six thousand people, and consisted of six large state farms, specialising in the production of citrus fruit, vegetable oils, dairy products, and meat. It included a dam and a major canal, a hydroelectric station and a pumping station, a repair works, a wood processing plant, and a jam factory. It was the largest economic project in the country, and was said to be larger than any comparable project anywhere else in the developing world. But it was in a vulnerable place: one hour’s drive from Pakistan, close to two Russian brigades and an airbase. The farms came under attack from the mujahedin, who mined the local roads. B. N. Mikhanov, the chief expert, and his colleagues—there were seventy-eight of them altogether—were professionals, mostly middle-aged and married. They were regularly threatened, and their Afghan fellow workers were sometimes abducted and killed. But they stayed at their posts, and went to work carrying an automatic, a bag of spare ammunition, and hand grenades to defend themselves if necessary. The project survived until after the Russians left, when it was destroyed by the mujahedin in their failed offensive against Jalalabad in the spring of 1989.³

Another major project was the Polytechnic Institute in Kabul, which had been completed well before the war began. Alexander Lunin was the chief adviser to the rector, and managed the Soviet teaching staff—more than a hundred of them. In addition to its three faculties—construction, geology, and electro-mechanics—the institute had a preparatory department which took in students from poorer families and brought them up to speed in Russian and other subjects. The institute too kept going, despite the threats, the shelling, the booby traps, and the death of colleagues.⁴

How much lasting good all this money did for the Afghan people is not clear. Before the Afghan Communists came to power, Soviet aid was given more or less on its merits. But thereafter it was distorted by the ideologically driven and ultimately futile attempt to build ‘socialism’.⁵ From the start, many programmes were ill-conceived for local conditions. Many more were ruined in thirty years of fighting. Aid supplies were diverted for private profit or hijacked by the mujahedin.

And all this effort brought the Russians few of the political dividends for which they had hoped. They had almost no influence on the events that led to the murder of Taraki by Amin. They got a closer grip on Amin’s successor, Babrak Karmal. But this brought its own problems. The plethora of Soviet advisers, their micromanagement of everyday business, robbed their Afghan opposite numbers of any sense of responsibility and initiative. Why take risks, if the Soviet comrades were willing to take the risks for you? Faced with interference at all levels in the military as well as the civilian bureaucracy, the Afghans often simply shrugged their shoulders and let the Russians take the strain. Najibullah, who was President of Afghanistan after 1986, described a typical meeting of the Afghan council of ministers: ‘We sit down at the table. Each minister comes with his own [Soviet] adviser. The meeting begins, the discussion becomes heated, and gradually the advisers come closer and closer to the table, so accordingly our people move away, and eventually only the advisers are left at the table.’⁶

The Advisers

Many of the Soviet advisers genuinely believed in their mission to help the local people and were wholeheartedly enthusiastic about it. The youth adviser and journalist Vladimir Snegirev exulted on his arrival, ‘It may be that we have had the good fortune to witness one of the most brilliant and tragic revolutions of the end of the century.’ He was present in March 1982 at the celebrations for the Afghan New Year in the Kabul stadium. ‘There is a striking contrast,’ he noted, ‘which is only possible here: many of the women on the terraces conceal their faces under the chador—a primitive, medieval superstition; but parachutists are landing in the stadium and they are women too, who grew up in this country. The chador and the parachute. You don’t have to be a prophet to foretell the victory of the parachute.’

For the next months and years Snegirev and many others like him found themselves wrestling with the problem of why this essentially democratic and well-intentioned revolution was so bitterly opposed by so many of the Afghan people. More than twenty years later—after the Afghan civil war, the reign of the Taliban, and the American invasion—Snegirev ruefully recognised how naive he had been: he himself had been living in a decaying Orwellian regime without a future. ‘But the dreams remained: ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Social justice. Down with the oppressors of the working class!’… After all, our own country was huge, and still seemed powerful. Yes, everyone was equally poor, but there was no terrible poverty, and there was a giant industry, canals, hydroelectric stations. Were it not for our sclerotic leadership, people like Brezhnev, everything would work out differently. That’s what I thought, that’s what many people my age thought. When we arrived in Afghanistan, even before we had had time to look round, we began to do what we had prepared ourselves to do for the whole of our previous lives… [H]ere [in Afghanistan] it was as if time had gone backwards… But now a power had arisen in this land which wanted to drag the people from out of their superstition, to give children the chance to go to school, peasants the possibility to plough their fields with tractors instead of oxen, women the opportunity to see the world directly, instead of through the eye slits of the chador. Was that not a revolution? The battle of the future against a past already condemned? And I was part of it.’⁷

The number of advisers and aid workers increased throughout the summer of 1979—Party advisers, military advisers, technical advisers, advisers on youth affairs from the Komsomol, trade union advisers despite the absence of an Afghan working class, advisers from the Soviet Ministry of Shipping even though the rivers in Afghanistan were barely navigable.⁸ There were advisers in all the ministries, in the factories, in the transport companies, banks, and educational institutions. The number of advisers in the Foreign and Internal Affairs ministries probably ran into the hundreds.⁹ Before the war began Soviet experts in Afghanistan were not well paid, even by comparison with experts from other Socialist countries, who might get as much as $1,000 a month. But after the invasion their pay went up, to about $700 a month, significantly more than they would have received back home. The bonus was known, with grim humour, as ‘coffin money’.¹⁰

Many of the people who went were well-qualified specialists. Others were enthusiastic amateurs. Many came voluntarily, because they were idealists, or because they wanted adventure, or because that was the only way they could get abroad, or because they thought they could better themselves. Of course, many other people who ended up as advisers in Afghanistan, perhaps the majority, had little choice in the matter. The military and Party political specialists were simply ordered to go. Others were invited to volunteer, which most of them did more or less willingly: it would have been a bad career move to refuse.

There were some sixteen to eighteen hundred Soviet military advisers in Afghanistan by the end of 1980. Sixty to eighty of them were generals. There were three or four officers attached to each Afghan army battalion, four or five in each regiment, eleven or twelve in each division, with interpreters to match.¹¹ They wore Afghan army uniform and were better paid than officers in the 40th Army. Advisers could put together the money for a car in one year, and for the down payment on a cooperative apartment back home in two, something that would take very much longer for an officer on Soviet pay scales. Not surprisingly the regular Soviet military hated the military advisers—the word was not exaggerated, according to Valeri Shiryaev, who served as a military interpreter with an Afghan division. Some Soviet units had notices on the entrance to their bases: ‘No dogs or advisers admitted’.

The attitude of the regular officers changed when it became clear that working with the Afghan army could be very dangerous. Two generals died in action: General Vlasov, and Lieutenant General Shkidchenko, whose helicopter went down while he was directing an Afghan army operation in Khost in January 1982. One in three of the advisers serving in Shiryaev’s division died in 1983–4. Even so, there were cases when Soviet units refused to make space on their helicopters for the evacuation of wounded advisers, saying that since they worked for the Afghans, it was for the Afghans to evacuate them.¹²

The Party advisers were the most numerous among the civilians. In 1983 the Central Committee of the PDPA had eighty Soviet advisers supported by fifty interpreters. They were intimately involved in the workings of party and government, often writing speeches for senior Afghans, which were then translated into Pushtu or Dari for the politicians to read out.¹³ These people had no specialised training for their mission beyond a one-week induction course. It seems to have been assumed that the ideological orthodoxies that were supposed to work in the Soviet Union would work just as well in Afghanistan. In practice they worked just as badly, or even worse. Many Party advisers were of poor calibre, especially in the early years, when Afghanistan was regarded as a convenient dumping place for people who were not making the grade back in the Soviet Union. With some honourable exceptions very few of them had any knowledge or understanding of the country and simply attempted to apply to Afghanistan the tired political and organisational formulas which were already failing in the Soviet Union.

The idea of sending Soviet youth advisers to Afghanistan was mooted soon after the April 1978 coup. Between May 1979 and November 1988 about a hundred and fifty officials from the Young Communist League of the Soviet Union, the Komsomol, served in Afghanistan as advisers. Their task was to set up a youth movement in the kishlaks as well as in the towns.¹⁴ All were volunteers, at least in principle. They were recruited from all over the Soviet Union. They would get a phone call from out of the blue: ‘It’s been suggested that you be recommended for a trip “across the river”’ (the accepted euphemism),¹⁵ to work with the Democratic Organisation of the Youth of Afghanistan (DOMA). They would get a six-week crash course in the history, culture, traditions, and languages of Afghanistan. They would then be sent off, initially to Kabul.

The Komsomol advisers were organised into teams to work with children and adolescents, on ideological and international affairs, on publishing, and in the provinces. But initially they concentrated on providing the DOMA with all the proper trappings: a Central Committee, a Secretariat, and departments for organisation, political work with the masses, military-patriotic affairs, work with the ‘young pioneers’, international affairs, financial, and general administrative affairs. They set up committees in the provinces and opened the Central Palace of the Pioneers in 1981 in the presence of Karmal’s partner Anakhita Ratebzad. They distributed ten thousand translations of Nikolai Ostrovski’s Socialist realist classic about Stalin’s first Five Year Plan, How The Steel Was Tempered, no doubt to the complete mystification of the lucky recipients. By the time the youth advisers were withdrawn at the end of 1988, they claimed that the DOMA had 220,000 members—a figure padded, a sceptic might think, by some serious double counting.

Nikolai Zakharov was one of the first to arrive. He landed at Kabul airport in the middle of a firefight and whatever illusions he may have had about his mission were soon dispelled. It was quite clear that his new Afghan colleagues were determined to work in their own way. He noted in his diary that Abdurrahman, a deputy leader of the DOMA, said after a drink too many, ‘In order to achieve total victory we will permit no internal attempts at opposition, even if we have to wade through blood.’¹⁶ The young people the DOMA was working with were unpromising material, heavily influenced by Islamic, Maoist, and nationalistic thinking. The advisers did not have the finance to carry through their ideas. Neither the Afghan authorities not the people back in the Soviet Union took much notice of their recommendations. Methods which might have worked in the Soviet Union were quite inappropriate in Afghanistan. As early as December 1981 one adviser ruefully recognised, ‘Copying the Komsomol system of personnel management takes no account of the real circumstances. Even though an instruction has been issued to that effect, there is no unified system of personnel in the country, and one reason for that is that it is not viable.’¹⁷ Not surprisingly, most of their efforts were in vain.

Of course, most of the advisers needed interpreters. Some were recruited from Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, where the people spoke languages similar to those in Afghanistan. Others came from the elite academic institutions of Moscow and Leningrad, where the study of Afghanistan, its history, its peoples, its languages, and its culture, could stand comparison with any in the world.

In June 1979 Yevgeni Kiselev was preparing for his final exams in the Oriental Department of Moscow State University. Soviet Union students were normally posted on graduation to jobs picked for them by the authorities. Kiselev was expecting to work for the news agency TASS in Kabul. Instead he was summoned out of the blue to a meeting in the Dean’s office. Here he and a couple of other fellow students met two men in civilian clothes who told them that all postings had been cancelled. All that year’s graduates in Persian and Pushtu were being sent to Afghanistan as interpreters. They were then interviewed by two colonels—polished, refined, polite, typical staff officers—who reminded them that as students they were liable to military service. They were therefore being taken into the army. On 12 July they were flown to Kabul and assigned to Afghan units to work alongside the Soviet military advisers. They wore Afghan military uniform and, like the advisers, were paid more than Soviet officers of the equivalent rank. Kiselev and five others were put to live in a three-bedroomed flat in a new microrayon which was barely finished and was still inadequately equipped. The rooms in the apartments had cement floors, and there were no mattresses, pillows, or sheets on the metal bed frames. Kiselev managed to track down some blankets and mattresses in the town. He and his colleagues had to improvise their own furniture.¹⁸

Another new arrival was Andrei Greshnov. He hoped to complete his studies in Kabul, but he had not yet passed the exam on the History of the Communist Party, an essential qualification for any foreign trip. He just scraped through, and was sent on his way after a short course at the Institute of African and Asian Studies on how to comport himself as a Soviet citizen abroad. But instead of continuing his studies as he had hoped, he was brutally told that he was going to be an interpreter with the Afghan army. If he refused, he would be excluded from the university. Two weeks later, without having taken his final exams, he too was on the aeroplane to Kabul. He discovered as soon as he landed that the Farsi he had learned at university had little in common with the Dari spoken on the Kabul streets: he could not understand what the airport workers were saying. He was assigned to the same apartment as Kiselev.¹⁹

The Women

Women went to Afghanistan during the war for various reasons. If they were in the military they were simply posted, whether they liked it or not. By the 1980s women made up just over 1.5 per cent of the total numbers in the Soviet armed forces.²⁰ Unlike the women who fought in the Second World War as bomber and fighter crews, as tank commanders, as snipers, these women served on the headquarters staff as archivists, cipher clerks, and interpreters, at the logistics base in Pul-i Khumri and in Kabul, or in the military hospitals and front-line medical units as doctors and nurses. Female civilian contract workers began to arrive in 1984 and worked in offices, in regimental libraries, as secretaries, in military stores and laundries, in Voentorg (the network of military shops). The commander of the 66th Independent Motor-rifle Brigade in Jalalabad even managed to get hold of a typist who could double up as a hairdresser.²¹

The volunteers had mixed motives. Doctors and nurses went to work in the military hospitals and forward medical stations out of a sense of professional commitment and duty. Some tended the wounded under fire, as their predecessors had done in the Second World War, and dealt with the most horrible wounds within days of arriving in Afghanistan.²² Some went for personal reasons: because their private lives had failed or because they badly needed the extra money. In Afghanistan they were fed regularly and for nothing, and they received a double salary.²³ Some went out of a spirit of adventure: service as a civilian employee with Soviet forces abroad was one of the few ways a single woman with no connections could travel. Unlike the women in the military, the civilians could always break their contracts if they did not like what they found in Afghanistan: within a week they could be back in the Soviet Union.

Lena Maltseva went from a genuine sense of idealism and adventure, to make her own contribution to the help her country was giving the Afghan people. She was nineteen, a student at the Medical Institute in Taganrog. In 1983 she wrote to Komsomolskaya Pravda that the girls at her school as well as the boys wanted to test themselves, to harden themselves. ‘And what’s more, we all wanted to prepare ourselves to defend the Motherland—I’m sorry for the bombastic language, but I can’t express it in any other way… Why do I want to go now? Well, it may sound stupid, but I’m afraid I won’t get [to Afghanistan] in time. It’s now so difficult there, with an undeclared war in progress. What’s more, one day I will be a teacher. But honestly, I’m not yet ready for that. One can only teach when one has had some experience of life… Surely I could be useful there? (Bombast again, but what else can I say?) I want to help the people of that country, and our Soviet people who are already there.’²⁴

The female volunteers, like the conscripts, were processed through their local Voenkomat. Many hoped to go to Germany, but there were few vacancies there and the officers in the Voenkomats needed to make up the quota for Afghanistan. So they persuaded or bullied the women to go there instead.

Though the women did not fight, they did from time to time come under fire. Forty-eight civilian employees and four praporshchiki died during the war, some as a result of enemy action, some in accidents, some from illness.²⁵ A total of 1,350 women received state awards for their service.²⁶ Two of the three women who were killed when an AN-12 was shot down over Kabul airport on 29 November 1986 were on the way to their first posting in Jalalabad. One had been recruited in the Soviet Union sixteen days earlier; the other only six days before.²⁷

Like the soldiers, the women were first sent to a transit camp in Kabul until their final destination was decided. Some enterprising women got so bored with waiting that they took matters into their own hands. The twenty-year-old Svetlana Rykova hitched a flight from Kabul to Kandahar, then persuaded a helicopter pilot to take her to Shindand, the great airbase in western Afghanistan. There she was offered a job in the officers’ mess. She refused it and held out until a vacancy opened as assistant to the director of financial services. She served in Afghanistan from April 1984 to February 1986.

Tatiana Kuzmina was a single mother in her early thirties. She served in Jalalabad first as a nurse, but then managed to wangle a job in a BAPO (Boevoi Agitatsionno-Propagandistski Otryad), a Military Agitation Propaganda Detachment. Tatiana was the only woman in this unit, which delivered food, medicine, and propaganda to the mountain villages around Jalalabad, put on concerts, and helped the sick and the mothers with their new babies. While she was out on a mission with the detachment on the eve of her final return to the Soviet Union, she was drowned in a mountain river. It was two weeks before her body was found.²⁸

Lilya, a highly qualified typist on the staff of one of the military districts back in the Soviet Union, was not paid enough to take her through to the end of the month and she made up the difference by collecting bottles for salvage. She could not afford adequate clothing for the winter. But in the 40th Army she was warm and well fed, beyond what she had believed possible.²⁹

Many women did get married, often while they were still in Afghanistan, whether that was their original intention or not. One said, ‘All of us women are lonely and frustrated in some way. Try to live on 120 roubles a month, as I do, especially if you want to dress decently and have an interesting holiday once a year. “They only go over there to find themselves a husband,” people often say. Well, what’s wrong with that? Why deny it? I’m 32 years old and I’m alone.’³⁰ Marriages could only be formally registered with the Soviet authorities in Kabul. A young couple from the 66th Independent Motor-rifle Brigade in Jalalabad were killed by rocket grenade fire on the road to the airport shortly after they had left the garrison. Natasha Glushak and her fiancé, an officer from the brigade’s communications company, managed to get to Kabul and register their marriage. Instead of flying back, they returned aboard a BTR. Just as it was arriving at Jalalabad, it was blown up by a remotely detonated mine. Only the upper half of Natasha’s body was recovered.³¹

The women were far outnumbered by the men, whose attitude to them was mixed. Colonel Antonenko, who commanded the 860th Independent Motor-rifle Regiment, said, ‘There were forty-four women in the regiment: nurses, laboratory assistants in the water purification station, waitresses, cooks, a canteen manager, shop assistants. We had no store of blood. When the regiment came out of battle, if we had wounded, the women would occasionally give their own blood. That really happened… Our women were wonderful and worthy of the highest praise.’³²

There was no dispute about the role of the nurses and doctors. One nurse remembered when soldiers brought in a wounded man, but wouldn’t leave, saying, ‘We don’t need anything, girls, can we just sit by you for a bit?’ Another remembered how one young boy, whose friend had been blown to pieces, couldn’t stop talking to her about it.³³ A telephone operator in a Kabul hotel who visited a mountain outpost where the men often saw no one for months at a time was asked by the commander, ‘Miss, would you take off your cap? I haven’t seen a woman for a whole year.’ All the soldiers came out of the trenches just to look at her hair. ‘Here, back home,’ one nurse later remarked, ‘they’ve got their mums and sisters and wives. They don’t need us now—but over there they told us things you wouldn’t normally tell anybody.’³⁴

After he left the Central Hospital for Infectious Diseases in Kabul, where he had been treated for a mixture of typhus, cholera, and hepatitis, one young officer started an affair with the nurse who had looked after him. His envious fellow officers told him maliciously that she was a witch. She drew portraits of her lovers and hung them on the wall of her room. His three predecessors had all been killed in action. Now she began to draw him too. He was half gripped by the superstition. But she never finished the drawing and he was only wounded, not killed. ‘We soldiers were very superstitious while the war was going on,’ he later said ruefully. He lost touch with his nurse after leaving Afghanistan. But he always preserved the warmest memory of her.³⁵

At the end of the day the nurses got little official recognition for what they had done. Alexander Khoroshavin, who served in the 860th Independent Motor-rifle Regiment in Faisabad, discovered to his disgust twenty years after the war that Ludmila Mikheeva, who had been a nurse with the regiment in 1983–5, was not entitled to any of the benefits which even the most unprepossessing veteran received for his service in Afghanistan.³⁶

The women were too often subjected to unbearable pressure from men prepared to use threats as well as blandishments. Many of the veterans talked of them with distasteful contempt. They called them chekistki, implying that they sold themselves for cheki, cheques, the special currency used by the Soviets in Afghanistan. Some conceded that women who went to Afghanistan as nurses and doctors may have done so for the best of reasons. But few of them had a good word for the others, the secretaries, the librarians, the storekeepers, or the laundrywomen. These they accused of going to Afghanistan solely in search of men and money.

The women themselves always resented the slander. They resorted to a variety of defensive tactics. Some accepted one protector in order to keep the others off.³⁷ Many Second World War generals, such as Rokossovski and Zhukov, had ‘Field Service Wives’ (PPZh—Pokhodno-Polevaya Zhena), who travelled with them from post to post. Now the institution was revived: it is portrayed with compassion by Andrei Dyshev in his novel PPZh, about a volunteer nurse, Gulya Karimova, and her lover Captain Gerasimov.³⁸

Valeri Shiryaev, the military interpreter, thought that all this represented the social reality inside Russia itself: many of the men came from the provinces and regarded women as prey or as something to be knocked about. But at least in Afghanistan the Party representatives sensibly did not try to interfere with people’s relationships as they would have done back home. There were inevitable tensions: ‘The smaller the garrison, the fewer the women, and the greater the competition, which sometimes led to fights, duels, suicide, and the search for death in battle.’³⁹

Not all the Soviet women in Afghanistan came there in the service of the Soviet state. Some came as the wives of Afghans, often students, whom they had met at home. Galina Margoeva was the wife of the engineer Haji Hussein. She and her husband remained in Kabul through all the changes in regime, through the horrors of the civil war and the depredations of the Taliban, living in their apartment in the microrayon by the housing construction combine near the airport. Tania was the wife of Nigmatulla, an Afghan officer who had trained in the Soviet Union and married her despite the opposition of her family and his own superiors. Their first child was born in Minsk. After five years he was posted first to Kabul, then to Kandahar and then to Herat. He continued to serve despite the changes of regime: he was the political officer of a division under Najibullah, a brigade under the mujahedin, and a division again under the Taliban. Tania was with him throughout. She wore the veil, learned Farsi, but remained an atheist. When Nigmatulla’s three brothers were killed, she took the nine orphans into her family and brought them up with her own children.⁴⁰

Life and Death in Kabul

In Kabul there was a curfew after eight o’clock, you could not safely walk in a large part of the city, and there was always shooting at night. Although the city was heavily garrisoned and its streets were continually patrolled by troops, police, and armoured vehicles, the mujahedin occasionally mounted attacks inside Kabul itself. In January 1981 they got close enough to the villa of the Chief Soviet Military Adviser in the embassy quarter to attack it with rocket-propelled grenades. The same day they attacked—unsuccessfully—a key electric power station some twenty-five miles outside Kabul. The following day a large cinema and the Soviet bookshop were blown up. In the next few days there were more than two hundred terrorist attacks in other major cities.⁴¹ In 1983 a bomb under the table in Kabul University dining room killed nine Soviets, including a woman professor.⁴²

People always carried their personal weapons and every apartment block had an armed guard. Nevertheless the capital was thought to be safe enough for senior officials and military advisers to bring their wives and families to live with them. Their standard of living was often higher than it would have been at home. Most lived in the microrayon, the pay was good, parcels and letters arrived regularly. The children were educated in the embassy school: it had to work in three shifts to accommodate them all, and even so it was overcrowded. You could watch the latest Soviet films in the embassy or the Soviet House of Culture.

The range in the embassy shop was limited, and the wives could buy only the goods that matched their husbands’ rank. So they spent much of their time shopping in the local market in the old microrayon, the parvanistka, a Russification of the words parva nist—‘not to worry’. Here they could find Western consumer goods and clothes which none of them had ever seen back home, some of it sent by Western aid agencies to relieve the Afghan poor. They bargained ruthlessly for second-hand jeans, jackets, and dresses, despite threats from the authorities to send them straight back to the Soviet Union if they persisted in shopping. Needless to say, the threats had no effect.⁴³

As the security situation deteriorated, greater constraints were placed upon the Soviet women in Afghanistan. In Jalalabad, after a number had been killed, women were not allowed to go on the streets without an armed escort. By 1986 they were not allowed to go without escort even into the centre of major cities such as Kabul. But the temptations of the Afghan bazaars, with their rich variety of Western consumer goods and designer clothes, were too great for some to resist. The more daring or irresponsible of them found their way to the bazaars despite the obstacles. Some hoped that if they kept their mouths shut while they were walking through the bazaars they would be mistaken for Western missionaries whom—they optimistically believed—the mujahedin would leave unharmed.⁴⁴

The advisers were never specially targeted by the mujahedin. But there were casualties nevertheless. Evgeni Okhrimiuk was a geologist who was posted to Afghanistan in 1976, when he was already sixty-three years old; at that time geologists were among the few Soviet advisers then working there. Okhrimiuk was put in charge of the team searching for natural resources, especially natural gas. Once the war started, and work in the outlying provinces became too difficult, he and his colleagues worked in the neighbourhood of Kabul, looking for water and building materials.

On 18 August 1981 Okhrimiuk left his apartment in the microrayon in his official car with his usual driver to go to his office about a mile away. He never arrived. The Russians later learned what had happened. Okhrimiuk agreed to let his driver give a lift to a couple of relatives. It was a put-up job. The two men took Okhrimiuk prisoner, so that he could be exchanged for the brother of one of the local guerrilla commanders, who had been captured by the Afghan army. Okhrimiuk wrote to his people that his captors had taken him on foot for five days to a hiding place in the high mountains, and asked for a helicopter to pick him up once the exchange had been agreed. Unfortunately the commander’s brother had already been shot. There were protracted negotiations about a ransom. They petered out. After Okhrimiuk had spent a year in captivity, the French Communist paper L’Humanité reported that he had been executed. His wife asked for a memorial to be erected in a Moscow cemetery. The authorities refused permission.⁴⁵

Aleksei and Marina Muratov first went to Afghanistan in 1970, above all because they needed the money. In Moscow they both worked as junior scientific assistants in the university, they had two sons, and they had to rely on help from Aleksei’s parents to get by. In Kabul Aleksei lectured in the polytechnic and Marina worked as a secretary. They liked the country and the people, and they remained there for three years.

Then the war came. ‘We understood from the beginning,’ said Marina later, ‘that the invasion was a crime. And when we returned to Afghanistan in the autumn of 1981, we continually felt ashamed: ashamed for our country which had sent its soldiers there to kill and be killed.’ This time both Aleksei and Marina taught in the Polytechnic Institute. Marina helped prepare Afghan students who were going to study in the Soviet Union.

They got used to the wartime conditions—continual shooting, breakdowns in the supply of electricity, sleeping with an automatic rifle under the bed—and the difficulties of life in the Soviet community, where you could be sent home for stepping even an inch out of line, and where their immediate superior disliked the Afghans and drank a lot too much.

The movements of the advisers and their families who lived at the Polytechnic Institute were strictly controlled. Alarms were signalled by the firing of a rocket, three long bursts from an automatic rifle, and by repeated banging on a length of rail outside the guardroom. Those who were assigned to the local defence force took up their positions; the rest took shelter. All lights in the apartments had to be turned out. The all clear was signalled by separate blows on the rail, by word of mouth, and by radio. The radios in the apartments had to be left on all the time.

The polytechnic regularly came under fire, and the inhabitants had to keep their eyes out for bombs and booby traps hidden under tables and in corners. Marina once picked up an explosive device disguised as an electric torch, but luckily it did not go off. She rarely saw any bloodshed, though she was there when a member of the embassy was shot down outside a shop after collecting his son from school. The boy sat by his body for forty minutes before he was picked up.

Towards the end of their third year in Afghanistan Aleksei and Marina went shopping. On their way out of the polytechnic she noticed one of the young Afghan guards looking at her oddly. She thought he must be under the influence of drugs. As they were returning to the polytechnic she fell over; it was only later that she realised the man had shot her. Aleksei was lying just behind her. He was dying. Marina subsequently had ten operations to save her leg. Her Afghan students visited her every day; one brought his father from the northern city of Mazar-i Sharif to pray for her.⁴⁶

Life and Death in the Provinces

Work in the provinces was more difficult than in Kabul and more dangerous too. The advisers had to travel across roads that were regularly mined. One group of Komsomol advisers from Kabul was ambushed and a woman was killed. In Herat the advisers were in principle only allowed to travel in armoured vehicles. But often there would be none available, so they had to travel in ordinary vehicles. And though the armour might protect you from bullets, it would not save you from a roadside mine. Herat did have one advantage, however. If you ran out of vodka, you could send a special messenger to get some from Kushka, the major logistics base, only three hours away by road.⁴⁷

As well as being dangerous, the work in the regions was depressing. In Logar province the advisers discovered that not one village supported the Kabul regime. Only 2.5 per cent of the children there were going to school.⁴⁸ From 1984 to 1986 Alexander Yuriev was in Kandahar: he had volunteered to go there when his predecessor, Grisha Semchenko, had been badly wounded. He described the state of the city in his diary: ‘Kandahar is a very beautiful town. But half of it has been destroyed, whole streets and blocks are in ruins, and the surviving buildings are pitted with scars from shell splinters and bullets. It is very dangerous to drive around: the rebels are firing from the green zone outside the city, and mount ambushes inside the city itself. Everyone goes around with their guns at the ready. What makes it worse is that we control only two of the city’s six administrative regions. The other four are controlled by the rebels, and the road along which we have to travel goes through the middle of them.’⁴⁹

Yuriev wrote home cheerfully enough: ‘Everything is fine with me. I live in a villa outside town, which was built by the Americans. Our working day is quite short—from 8–9 a.m. to 2 p.m. We sometimes get two or three days off in the week.’ These bland words were not inaccurate, but they concealed the reality. The villa had indeed been built by Americans constructing the local airport. But the water supply had broken down, and there was neither lighting nor heating. The place was bombarded several times a day. ‘During the bombardments, you made sure there were two walls between you and the street. You lay on the floor in your flak jacket and helmet, and hoped that there wouldn’t be a direct hit on the ceiling.’ It was several miles from the villa to the Kandahar headquarters of the local committee of the DOMA, where Yuriev worked. The road was always heavily mined: every week someone got blown up on it. Every morning a flail tank cleared the mines, Soviet soldiers were posted along the road, and it was safe to travel. Then the soldiers were withdrawn and the road was back in the hands of the rebels. So Yuriev had to get home again by two o’clock. If serious fighting was going on, it was better not to leave the house at all; those were counted as days off. Fighting went on all around, even on working days. ‘There was fighting on 10 and 11 August [1985],’ writes Yuriev in his diary. ‘Many dead and wounded. We open a branch of the Institute for Youth Workers of the Central Committee of the DOMA… Comrade Khanif spoke at the meeting. He said that the branch was being opened in the middle of a war. But that was necessary, because young people needed to learn the theory of revolution, and use it in the course of the revolutionary struggle. In the open, on the street, I hold the first lesson for students of the branch on “The place and role of DOMA in the political system of Afghan society”.’⁵⁰

The advisers could go for weeks without hearing a word of Russian spoken. Not everyone was able to stand the nervous tension. ‘How can one describe the conditions in which we lived?’ asked Alexander Gavrya, who was in Afghanistan from October 1982 to October 1985, and again from April to November 1988. ‘Well, take for example Chag-charan, in the province of Ghor. It was deep in the mountains, and helicopters flying there were shot down, so that you had to get there in an armed column, which might have to fight its way through. I was there once, and called in on Sasha Babchenko, one of our advisers. Suddenly I heard someone wailing on the other side of the wall, loudly, terribly, like an animal. I jumped for my gun. “Don’t worry,” said Sasha, “that’s an adviser from another department. He gets drunk and wails every evening. The boys will soon calm him down.”’⁵¹

The rebels controlled the countryside by night, even if they did not do so by day. There was little opportunity to work effectively with the peasants. And there was of course no proletariat to work with since there was almost no industry in the country anyway. So the advisers concentrated on building up the local party and youth organisations, on helping the schools, and setting up children’s summer camps. One visitor from the Soviet Union tactlessly gave a talk to a local school on how Soviet children helped their elders fight the Germans by putting sand in their machine guns and tanks. The listeners naturally pricked up their ears. The divisional commander was duly furious: ‘Don’t ever let a loudmouth like that get within range of my pistol again.’⁵²

Yusuf Abdullaev, another youth adviser, reported on a trip round the provinces in June 1981: ‘The situation is very difficult. Only the regional centres are in the hands of the people’s power [the Kabul regime]… Everyone’s efforts are directed to the struggle against the rebels. After an attempt to open a school they broke the arms and the legs of four of the children. There are strong feelings of hostility towards the Soviets, and towards the Russian soldiers, for which the soldiers themselves are often to blame. The rebels have burned a column of eighteen vehicles carrying food, which they commandeered in order to sell. There is no sign of the Afghan army and Tsarandoi. The people who are doing the fighting are our own military units and some of the malishi [militia detachments for the defence of the revolution] from among the local population. The rebels terrorise the locals—they fine the families of those who are collaborating with the authorities twenty or forty thousand afgani [the Afghan currency].’⁵³

By February 1982 Abdullaev was even more gloomy. There were over a hundred schools in Farakh province: perhaps no more than ten were open. Only four thousand out of more than twenty-one thousand children of school age were studying. Not one of the fifty-one cooperatives was working. The local Communist youth organisation was totally disorganised, and probably had no more than two hundred members. There were more than forty rebel bands operating in the area; their average age was under thirty. Abdullaev nevertheless believed that most of the population accepted that government terror and violence had declined with the installation of the Babrak regime, and that the bands were discrediting themselves by their behaviour. But people remained very cautious. A few months later Abdullaev reported from Khost that no one mentioned Babrak Karmal, apart from an Afghan officer who had shouted out, ‘Death to Karmal!’ at a political meeting in his artillery regiment.

Herat, where it had all started, was contested territory throughout the war. The mujahedin controlled the old city, while the government and the Russians controlled the suburbs and the essential main road which skirted them. The Soviet advisers lived in the Hotel Herat, which had been built a few years earlier on the edge of the city on the road to the airport, and had been popular with tourists. By now it had been transformed into a small fortress: sandbags on the balconies, a BTR and a mortar team at the entrance, and instead of a liveried doorman a heavily armed soldier in a flak jacket. The inhabitants were advised to travel with an armoured escort even inside the city.

In June 1981 one of the Komsomol advisers, Gena Kulazhenko, set off to drive the short distance from the airport to the hotel. There was no escort available, so he took a Toyota taxi. He never arrived. His colleagues from Kabul got no help from the Soviet military or civilian authorities, and went themselves to Herat to find out what had happened. They managed to find the Toyota, riddled with bullets; a local mullah said he knew where Kulazhenko’s grave was. They set off escorted by a tank and two BTRs, which promptly got stuck in the narrow street of the local kishlak. The mullah led them on foot to a grave, but the corpse they dug up was badly decomposed and was not that of Kulazhenko. They then fell into an ambush. Later one of the local rebel bands put out a leaflet saying that Kulazhenko had been executed and buried in secret.⁵⁴

This was the first of four fatal casualties suffered by the Komsomol advisers. Nikolai Serov then died in 1984 of cancer of the blood, Ator Abdukadyrov was killed in a bombardment, and Alexander Babchenko died in 1987 just before he was due to go home.

Nikolai Komissarov was a Komsomol official from Kazan. He was sent to Faisabad in 1982. There were eighteen other advisers there, four military, the rest civilians, living in rented accommodation in the town. Komissarov was responsible for eleven kishlaks, which he and his Tajik interpreter visited regularly, unarmed, to do youth work; one of their triumphs was to persuade the local girls’ school to abandon the veil. They had other tasks as well: to acquire intelligence and to help set up local self-defence organisations.⁵⁵

When Komissarov heard that the whole of the senior class in one of his schools had been persuaded to go over to the rebels he took a military driver and drove off to see what was happening. The kishlak was deep in the countryside and to go there without an armoured escort was an exceptionally dangerous thing to do. Two armoured vehicles were sent to rescue him if they could. It turned out to be unnecessary. ‘When we were halfway there,’ Captain Igor Morozov recounted, ‘we found his car. The soldier, white-faced from what he had been through, was gripping the steering wheel convulsively. Komissarov was sitting beside him without batting an eyelid, and even tried to make a joke of it, the bastard. What he had said to those schoolboys no one knows. But it’s a fact that none of them joined the rebels. Komissarov was reprimanded for his breach of discipline—quite rightly.’⁵⁶

Vyacheslav Nekrasov came from Sverdlovsk (Yekaterinburg), where he worked as a lathe operator and foreman in a defence factory, served in the army, and studied at the Higher Komsomol School. He was twenty-eight years old and working as First Secretary of a local Komsomol committee when he was chosen in 1982 to go to Afghanistan to advise on youth affairs. Like others, he told his family he was being sent to Mongolia. He would work there for a year, he said, and would then bring them out to join him. He bought a Mongolian dictionary to back up his story.

Nekrasov and his interpreter, Dodikhudo Saimetdinov, flew to Kabul in October 1982, which they found far more sophisticated and Westernised than they had been led to believe. In November they were sent to work in Faryab province in northern Afghanistan.

Here Nekrasov was given a good deal of freedom by his bosses to act as he thought best. One project was to send a group of young leaders to see how Muslims lived in the Soviet Union. Nekrasov and Saimetdinov managed, with considerable difficulty, to persuade a local mullah to go with them. It was worth it: shortly after the mullah returned, Nekrasov heard him describe the visit in glowing terms over the muezzin loudspeakers.

On a visit to Kabul, Nekrasov laid hands on a mobile cinema, complete with a library of Indian, Soviet, and Afghan films and three Afghan operators. He cadged an aeroplane to fly the team to Fariab and took it around the province. The films were popular even in otherwise hostile kishlaks. Nekrasov’s team did not charge for tickets and there were only two conditions: there should have been no shooting in the kishlak for a week before the performance and weapons had to be left outside. Ironically, one film popular among the Afghans was the comedy thriller White Sun of the Desert (Beloe Solntse Pustynya), among the most successful of all Soviet films, about the war in the 1920s against the rebels in Central Asia—rebels who were ethnically similar to the Afghans themselves.

Like the other civilian political advisers, Nekrasov did get mixed up in military operations from time to time. But his contacts also occasionally enabled him to negotiate ceasefire arrangements with the local guerrilla leaders, saving civilian lives as well as those of the fighters on both sides.⁵⁷

The number of specialists and advisers was run down from 1986 onwards as the aim of modernising Afghanistan’s society and its political and economic system came to seem more and more unattainable. It was a bitter disappointment for those who had risked their lives and health in what they believed was a good cause.

And yet when people back in the Soviet Union asked them how they managed to survive the horrors, many of them discovered that they had fallen in love with Afghanistan. ‘We did not survive—we lived. We lived life to the full. Everything was interesting, every day was packed,’ wrote Vyacheslav Nekrasov. ‘Of course we were young, carefree, quick to make new friends. Even though more than ten years have passed, we are still like a single family of brothers.’⁵⁸

Even when they are on campaign, the soldiers in most armies spend little time fighting. Instead they hang around, grumble about their officers, their sergeants, and the stupidity of the military machine in general, avoid extra duties, scrounge for food, try to get drunk, think and talk incessantly about women (though not in battle, when they have other things on their minds), boast disgracefully, and engage in laddish horseplay which sometimes degenerates into bullying and physical violence. All this apparently pointless activity, which the British call ‘soldiering’, has one invaluable by-product. It reinforces the sense of comradeship which is essential to the soldiers’ survival in a fight.¹

The soldiers of the 40th Army were little different. They lived in primitive and unhealthy surroundings, freezing in winter, boiling in summer, with few amenities and practically no female company. They ate bad and sometimes insufficient food. They succumbed to epidemic disease. They were often bullied by their officers, by their sergeants, and by the senior soldiers. They got no leave, except perhaps to attend the funeral of an immediate family member. But they endured hardship with the stoicism of the Russian soldier throughout the ages, and they were willing to go on fighting for their comrades even when the war itself seemed to have lost any purpose.

The Conscripts

However reluctantly, most young men in the Soviet Union accepted service in the army as an inescapable staging post on the road to adulthood. The ideals of patriotism, duty, the leading role of an omniscient Communist Party, and the superiority of the Soviet way of life were drilled into them from their earliest days. Some of these ideals stuck.

Conscripts served for two years. The annual batch of recruits was called up in two massive levies, in spring and autumn, and their heads were shaved, a tradition from Tsarist times. After one month’s basic training, those destined for Afghanistan were usually sent for three months into ‘Quarantine’—training camps in the Central Asian republics—where the physical conditions were similar to those in Afghanistan. So those who were called up in the spring might not actually get to Afghanistan itself until August. They would then serve there for some twenty months, though commanders could and did hold back soldiers due for demobilisation until the next bunch of new recruits had arrived.²

Conscripts who already had a speciality—higher education, medical or other relevant qualifications—would serve in an appropriate capacity; or they might be selected for six months’ training as sergeant-drivers or gunners before going to Afghanistan, and would then serve there only eighteen months. Able soldiers could be promoted to sergeant after a year or eighteen months in the field. The power lay with their commanders, who could also reduce a sergeant to the ranks again if he failed to perform.³

Despite the surrounding secrecy, parents quickly realised what was going on. Those with money or influence—parents from Moscow or Leningrad or the Baltic States—had regularly bribed the recruiting office or pulled strings to keep their sons out of the army.⁴ They did so with even greater determination once the war began. And so the boys who fought were mostly from the rural and working classes. A survey of fifteen hundred soldiers taken in 1986 showed that more than two-thirds were from the countryside or from working-class families with no secondary education, at a time when nearly two-thirds of the population already lived in cities. Nearly a quarter came from broken families. Not one came from a family with a background in the Party, bureaucratic, institutional, or military elite.⁵ Colonel General Krivosheev, the military historian, remarked sarcastically that they might as well restore ‘the old romantic name of the armed forces—The Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army’.⁶

Sometimes the authorities did not bother to tell the conscripts where they were going, but simply bundled them off with a round of vodka to ease the transition.⁷ Even when they knew their destination, they were supposed to tell their families only that they would be serving abroad. The prohibition was eroded with time, but many soldiers—like the youth adviser Vyacheslav Nekrasov—still tried to ease their families’ anxiety by saying they were going to Mongolia. Most parents were not fooled: Vladislav Tamarov’s father replied to his first soothing letter home that he shouldn’t think his parents were stupid: they knew perfectly well where he was.⁸

On the eve of his departure Andrei Ponomarev was paraded with his fellow conscripts and told that anyone not wishing to go to Afghanistan should take three paces forward: he would then serve in the Soviet Union. Much as they might have liked to, neither Ponomarev nor anyone else did so out of a sense of shame and a fear that they would be ostracised. Ponomarev later served in the 860th Independent Motor-rifle Regiment in Badakhshan in north-east Afghanistan.⁹

In May 1985 Vitali Krivenko and his fellow conscripts were taken by train and plane more than twelve hundred miles from his home in Kazakhstan to a training camp outside Leningrad. There they were sent to the bathhouse, given two hours to get their new uniforms in order, and started their training straight away. The standard infantry training—route marches, field exercises, shooting, drill, political classes, and PT—was very harsh. So were the drill sergeants. But when it came to the test of battle, Krivenko found that the training had served him well and that he had become a good general-purpose soldier.

Problems

There had always been a great deal of bullying in the Soviet army, and in the Tsarist army before it. But a more established ritual of bullying, dedovshchina, the ‘grandfather system’, emerged in the late 1960s.

Russian commentators give various reasons for the rise of dedovshchina. The conscript army was demoralised. It was too large and the soldiers were underemployed. Many conscripts fell below the standards needed by a technically sophisticated force. Some were recruited from the prisons and brought with them the bullying rituals of the criminal world.

Under this system, a soldier in his last six months was known as a ‘grandfather’ (ded). New recruits were made to clean the barracks, look after the grandfathers’ kit, get them cigarettes from the shop and food from the canteen. They were ritually humiliated, and beaten sometimes to the point of serious injury. Most endured, and consoled themselves with the thought that they too would be grandfathers one day. Some broke under the strain: they deserted, mutilated themselves, or committed suicide.

Some, of unusual physical as well as moral strength, stood up for themselves and were eventually left alone. Krivenko was older than the other conscripts because he had spent time in prison. His age and experience gave him authority among the other soldiers, and the grandfathers dealt with him cautiously.¹⁰ Sergei Nikiforov was a judo expert and fought his tormentors to a standstill. Soldiers from the same republic or region stuck together in self-defence. The grandfathers in one unit were warned that if anything happened to the only two Chechen soldiers there, their countrymen would take a merciless revenge.¹¹

It depended, too, on where you were. The army could not afford to employ substandard soldiers in the elite strategic rocket forces, where the grandfather system was much less brutal. It was the same in the KGB’s frontier forces, who had a real job to do; and in the elite special forces and parachute units, where morale was usually high. Sergei Morozov, a sergeant in the 56th Guards Independent Airborne Assault Brigade, claimed that there was no dedovshchina in his unit: people were always too busy or too tired. When they were not on operations, all they wanted to do was eat and sleep.¹²

In Afghanistan the system was less oppressive even in the motor-rifle units, because there too the soldiers had real work to do. The grandfathers still gave their juniors the run-around, but it was hard to preserve the distinctions in battle. And a bully risked being cut down by a bullet from his own side, as well as from the enemy: in the heat of the fight no one would bother to investigate.¹³ Even so, 33 per cent of the military crimes dealt with in the 40th Army in 1987 were ‘military bullying’. More than two hundred soldiers suffered in one year: some had been killed and others severely wounded.¹⁴

Some Afgantsy maintained that despite its obvious negative features dedovshchina helped to maintain order and discipline.¹⁵ In front-line units, they said, the seasoned soldiers taught the new arrivals to keep themselves clean, obey orders, and care for their equipment. As a recruit, Andrei Ponomarev found the bullying very difficult to bear, and though he did not break, he often crept away after a ritual beating to weep in a corner. He and his colleagues vowed that when they became senior soldiers in their turn they would not use the methods that had been applied to them. But they found this did not work. The new recruits ceased to respect them and would not do what they were told. So Ponomarev too started to use his fists: it was, he said, the only reliable way of getting your point across.¹⁶ He and those who thought like him knew well enough that in other armies the positive aspects they claimed for dedovshchina were the responsibility of experienced professional NCOs. Alexander Gergel, a conscript sergeant in the 860th Independent Motor-rifle Regiment, accepted that dedovshchina had eaten away at the military system. That would not change, he thought, until the Russian army too was given the corps of long-service professional NCOs it lacked.

In one serious way the 40th Army in Afghanistan differed from its predecessors: it had a massive health problem, of a kind the Soviet army had never experienced before. The Russians built seven military hospitals in Afghanistan, but chronic lack of funds meant that they were badly equipped, undermanned, and barely able to cope.¹⁷ The near collapse of the 40th Army’s medical services was one of the worst consequences of the improvisation and lack of funding which accompanied its deployment. One doctor in a brigade casualty clearing station expressed himself with particular bitterness: ‘One has to stick it out and look as if one is saving people. But how can you save people, when there are no medicines, no bandages, and no doctors? People die of infections, of disease, because they weren’t helped in time. Our superiors think that you can save people by giving them one injection against shock. But you can’t, and when the effect of the injection wears off, the patient gives up the ghost and there’s nothing we can do to help him. The only thing we have is alcohol, and even that doesn’t always help. If we had what we needed, we could save three-quarters of them, but as it is…’¹⁸

He may have been exaggerating. But what is clear is that the medical services almost lost the battle not against war wounds, but against infectious disease. The figures speak for themselves. More than three-quarters of those who served in Afghanistan spent time in hospital. Some 11 per cent were wounded or injured. The rest—69 per cent of all those who served during the war—suffered from serious sickness: 28 per cent from infectious hepatitis, 7.5 per cent from typhoid fever, and the rest from infectious dysentery, malaria, and other diseases.¹⁹

Units were often far below strength because so many of the soldiers were sick. The main scourge was hepatitis. The joke among the soldiers was that soldiers got jaundice, officers got Botkin’s disease, and generals were treated for hepatitis. There were stories that some soldiers evaded duty by getting medical orderlies in the hospitals to give them urine from infected patients: if you drank it, you got the disease.²⁰

By the end of 1981 every fourth soldier in the 5th Guards Motor-rifle Division in Shindand had been laid low. The commander, Boris Gromov, his deputies, and all the regimental commanders were down at the same time. The division was effectively unfit for battle.²¹ At any given moment up to a quarter, perhaps even a third, of the 40th Army might be incapacitated by disease. At the height of the epidemic, there was only one nurse for every three hundred patients.²²

Hepatitis was not the only problem. In the summer of 1985 a patrol from the 66th Independent Motor-rifle Brigade in Jalalabad drank the water from a roadside spring as they were returning from patrol. A few days later three of them collapsed on parade with cholera. More than half the brigade fell sick. A rumour circulated that the water had been deliberately infected by ‘two Europeans dressed in local clothes’. To prevent further infection, people said, the bodies were being cremated—something almost unheard of in what was still at heart an Orthodox country.²³ The sick were isolated behind barbed wire, the doctors and nurses were isolated with them, and additional medical staff had to be flown in from Moscow as reinforcements.²⁴

The situation of the 40th Army thus resembled that of the British and French armies in the Crimean War, and for much the same reasons: dirty water, appalling sanitation, dirty cooks, dirty canteens, dirty clothes, poor diet. The Soviets prided themselves on the number of hospitals and orphanages they built in Afghanistan. But they filled more hospitals and orphanages than they constructed, and the bigger the hospital, the worse the sanitary conditions: the rate of hepatitis was highest not in the small outposts, but in the base camps, where it should have been easiest to prevent. The Soviet medical services in the Second World War were much better at controlling disease than their successors.

But the successors were better off in one important way: they could evacuate casualties from the battlefield by helicopter. One sanguine account claimed that nine out of ten wounded soldiers received first aid in thirty minutes and got to a doctor in six hours.²⁵ It was a matter of pride to evacuate the wounded and the bodies of the dead, even under fire and even at the risk of further casualties. The collapse of this tradition, said one officer who had served in both wars, marked for him the degradation which distinguished the Soviet army in Afghanistan from the Russian army in Chechnya.²⁶

Everyday Life

The 40th Army was deployed in four main bases, each housing a division and other units. The 5th Guards Motor-rifle Division was in Shindand near Helmand, where there was also a major airbase. The 201st Motor-rifle Division was in Kunduz in the north. The 108th Motor-rifle Division was in Kabul, and later at the airbase in Bagram. The 103rd Guards Air Assault Division was at Kabul airport. Lesser forces were based around the country—brigades detached from their parent divisions, independent regiments, isolated battalions, special forces units, and in the numerous zastavas. These were concentrated particularly in the south and east, facing the vulnerable thirteen hundred-mile frontier with Pakistan around Kandahar, Gardez, and Jalalabad. All these bases, even in Kabul, were defended against terrorist attack by rings of mines, barbed wire, and guard posts.

In the larger bases the officers, the medical section, and the shop were eventually accommodated in ‘modules’, single-storey prefabricated plywood huts, painted green, with tiled washrooms, though the staff of the 108th Motor-rifle Division on the edge of Kabul continued to live in scruffy huts on the back of lorries.²⁷ The rest—unlucky junior officers, the soldiers, the canteen, the kitchen, the stores, the armouries—were usually accommodated in tents. Women usually had separate modules, though occasionally they had to share them with the officers, separated by a partition from the men, though this did not always present an absolute barrier to the enterprising.

Each base had a military hospital or casualty clearing station to deal with battle casualties and the far larger number of soldiers suffering from diseases, and a morgue where the dead were prepared for their journey home. Even the smallest bases had a ‘Lenin Room’, in which the soldiers could relax, with a portrait of Lenin and the current Soviet leader on the wall, a noticeboard with the latest political slogans, a few books and magazines, and somewhere to sit and write letters.

Sometimes units were accommodated in existing buildings. The 3rd Battalion of the 56th Independent Air Assault Brigade was based in a former Anglican church mission near the Pakistan border. The handful of buildings and the wall around them were built of mud bricks mixed with cement. Outside the wall was a large refuse dump, where the garrison got rid of unwanted munitions along with household rubbish. Once the dump caught fire, and going to the nearby latrine became a dangerous business as shells and rockets exploded. The base was surrounded by minefields laid by the motor-rifle unit which had been there earlier. They had not had the sense to leave maps behind and so two or three times a year someone—usually one of the locals—blew himself up on an anti-personnel mine. By day the government controlled the surrounding villages; by night they were controlled by the rebels. A major operation was mounted against the rebels every year, but even if the authority of the government could be reasserted, it was never for long.²⁸

The 860th Independent Red Banner Pskov Motor-Rifle Regiment occupied a typical medium-sized base in Faisabad in Badakhshan province in north-east Afghanistan. The regiment arrived there in late January 1980 from its home in Kyrgyzstan, after marching for a month through the snow-covered mountains and over passes up to sixteen thousand feet high, a march which went down in army legend. The regiment soon suffered its first casualties: one soldier was captured and his mutilated body was found two days later. His murderer had foolishly held on to the man’s rifle. He was found and shot on the spot.²⁹

The regiment’s task was to block the caravan route from Pakistan and China through the Wakhan Corridor, a thin sliver of land carved out by the British eight decades earlier as a barrier between themselves and the Russians, and to prevent the lucrative export of lapis lazuli, which the insurgents mined in the high mountains. Its nominal strength was 2,198, but in practice it could usually muster no more than some fifteen hundred men because of casualties, sickness, and detachment.³⁰ The base was about three miles outside Faisabad itself, in a broad valley surrounded by hills and mountains. It had a hospital, a shop, a bakery, a library, and a laundry. You could bathe in the fast-flowing River Kochka nearby, a dangerous business: thirty soldiers drowned in the course of five years. Such accidental deaths were normally written off for the record as battle casualties.

The officers lived in modules. The soldiers lived in tents, each with room for sixty men, heated by two wood stoves in the winter. The better tents were made in three layers: the outside layer consisted of waterproof canvas, the next was made of thick material to provide insulation, and the inside layer was of light cloth to brighten the tent up.³¹ The inhabitants often covered the inside of their tent with wood from ammunition boxes. This made it more homely, kept out the draughts in the winter, and stopped it blowing about so much in the wind. The soldiers had no proper boxes in which to keep their possessions, so they used the space between the walls of the tents to hide letters, photos, presents for their families, home-brewed beer, drugs, and other contraband.

The 1st Battalion was lucky enough to live in more permanent accommodation at Bakharak, some twenty-five miles from Faisabad, in a valley surrounded by high mountains and fed by three rivers, whose banks were thick with cherry trees. Villages lay on the broad mountain terraces, surrounded by orchards and small cultivated fields. Irrigation canals watered the whole valley. The battalion consisted of three rifle companies, mortar, rocket, and howitzer batteries, a reconnaissance platoon, a signals platoon, and an administrative platoon—nominally about five hundred men, though at times the number might fall to half that.

The road from Bakharak to Faisabad was open at first. Supplies got through without trouble and the battalion commander could go to regimental meetings in Faisabad by jeep. But by the end of 1980 the battalion was cut off from the rest of the regiment by the insurgents. Attempts were made each summer to send through a supply column. Each summer the column got bogged down under fire and needed to turn back. So the battalion had to be supplied by helicopter: twice a day, except on Sundays, weather permitting. The helicopters would arrive in pairs, two Mi-8s, flying at a great height until they were over the landing strip, firing flares as protection against the mujahedin’s anti-aircraft rockets. The soldiers would rush to greet them as they landed, to unload the cargo and to collect their letters from home.

The battalion lived in an old Afghan fort, about seventy-five yards square, with a watchtower on each corner. The men were on duty from five in the morning to ten at night, and slept in rooms built into three of the mud walls. The fourth wall was more than three feet thick and twelve feet high. The roofs were flat, made of wood branches and earth which had bonded together and kept the place cool in summer and warm in winter. The windows were covered with plastic and looked out on a gallery surrounding the internal courtyard. The soldiers built another low wall around the territory. It contained the elements of a garden, with shady trees, roses, and grass. A huge apricot tree stood in the middle and a thick mulberry tree in one corner. There were irrigation ditches with running water even inside the perimeter of the fort. Outside the wall were a small helicopter pad and a park for the battalion’s armoured vehicles. The generator sometimes worked for only two hours a night and the soldiers had to make do with kerosene lamps.³²

Improvements were added gradually. In the first year there was no bathhouse: the soldiers remained dirty throughout the winter until the ice broke on the river and they could wash themselves.³³ The quarters were given wooden ceilings so that bits of wood and earth no longer fell on the sleepers’ heads. The walls were whitewashed. Brick stoves were built to keep the place warm. A line of concrete blocks was set up to commemorate the battalion’s dead. It was called the Alley of Glory, and the soldiers goose-stepped past it when they mounted the guard. The ‘Lenin Room’ acquired a television set: you could just about get two Soviet programmes when the generator was working. Sometimes a cinema operator brought a film from Faisabad. But for the most part the soldiers of the 1st Battalion had to amuse themselves as best they could. There were of course no women at Bakharak. From the vantage of their watchtowers, the soldiers would unscrew the sniperscopes from their rifles to look at the local women in their courtyards.³⁴

There was a straggling kishlak of about fifteen hundred inhabitants a few hundred yards from the fort. In 1982 the mujahedin shelled the fort a couple of times with mortars. Towards the end of the war a sentry was killed by a sniper. Otherwise the relationship between the inhabitants of the fort and the inhabitants of the kishlak was not particularly hostile. The soldiers were not supposed to go there on their own lest they were attacked or kidnapped. But they were occasionally allowed to visit the bazaar in armed groups with an officer, sometimes accompanied by armoured vehicles, to buy cigarettes and matches, sweets as a substitute for the sugar that they used to brew their own beer, braga, lamb and rice to make plov (pilaf) to celebrate someone’s birthday, jeans and tape recorders to take home, and fresh fruit, which cost next to nothing in season. The drugs were cheap too, or you could get them in exchange for a bar of soap.³⁵

Despite the hardships, the morale of the soldiers held up, for the most part, well enough. They did their duty on the battlefield and they endured stoically until the longed-for day of demobilisation arrived. Everything depended on the quality of their officers. The Soviet officers had been thoroughly trained in the principles of leadership: how to look after their men and how to manage them in battle.³⁶ But when they arrived in Afghanistan most of them had no practical experience. And—as in other armies—not all of them were up to the job.

The soldiers knew well enough what they wanted from their officers: competence and fairness, personal courage, tactical skill, and a sense that their lives would not be sacrificed unnecessarily. What they did not want, but felt they got too often, were commanders more concerned with promoting their military careers than caring for their soldiers’ lives. These are the concerns of soldiers throughout the ages: Private Warren Olney, who fought for the Union in one of the first battles of the American Civil War, expressed himself in almost the same terms.³⁷

Long after they had served together in Bakharak, Alexander Gergel called on his company commander, Captain Yevgeni Konovalov, in retirement. ‘With his Cossack moustaches he was dashing in appearance, lively, full of joie de vivre in every word and movement… When I now look back over those past events, I am horrified to think what a difficult position the company commander found himself in: on the one hand, the oppressive commands of his superiors and on the other, the commands of his conscience, which prevented him from sacrificing his eighteen-year-old soldiers to promote the interests of a few careerists, who looked on the war as a way of getting on in the service more quickly. I greatly respected my commander when I was serving with him. But later I respected him even more when I understood how much he had really done to protect us, and to ensure that we got back safe and sound to our parents. Under Konovalov, our company was one of the best. But I think that he soon understood the pointlessness of the war, and was determined not to expose his people unnecessarily to hostile fire, or carry out stupid orders with too much zeal.’³⁸

‘The main thing,’ said Alexander Kartsev about his time as an infantry lieutenant, ‘was to keep the men occupied with real work. After I… was sent to command a platoon at a guard post, I found that the senior soldiers (and the cronies of the deputy platoon commander) had got into the habit of making the new arrivals do sentry duty at the worst times: at night and before dawn. Since I had to sign the roster, it was not difficult to see what was going on. And if instead of sleeping you go round the sentries twice a night, you see and learn a great deal. We sorted out the problem within a week.

‘Then we made sure that the men were always busy, so that they did not have too much free time. In addition to the necessary business of strengthening our fortifications, I organised daily PT sessions. We had no radio or television, the newspapers arrived irregularly, and we were seriously short of information. So in the evening I got each soldier to talk about his home and his family, and those who could play the guitar or the harmonium would put on concerts.

‘And the platoon commander needed to know his men: not only his deputy, but the four sergeants, the Komsomol secretary, the medical orderly, the drivers, the gunners. That was already half of the platoon; and you got to know the rest by inspecting the sentries at night.

‘Of course, I was lucky. I didn’t go to Afghanistan immediately I had finished officer school, but did specialist training for another whole year. It could be difficult for the young lieutenants who went out to Afghanistan straight from their basic training. The sergeants were often more experienced than they were and they found it hard to establish their authority. Many of them were too arrogant to sleep in the same tents as the men, as I did; others became too familiar with the soldiers, and their authority was undermined. The trick was to find the golden mean.’³⁹

Russians and Afghans

Russians later claimed that, despite all the brutalities of the war, on a human level they got on with the Afghan population rather well—better than the NATO soldiers who succeeded them.

It is a large claim, but it may be justified. Because many Soviet soldiers came from poor rural backgrounds, they could relate to the Afghan peasants and the lives they lived. Andrei Ponomarev, who served in Bakharak, came from a village in the Kaluga province south of Moscow. For a while he was stationed at a zastava guarding a bridge across the river which was manned by Afghans as well as Soviet soldiers. The Afghans lived in dugouts interspersed with the Russian ones. Ponomarev got on well with the Afghan conscript soldiers, who were on the whole better fed than the Russians. In civilian life they were peasants like him: only the land they had to cultivate was much poorer than that in Kaluga. They were anxious to learn Russian, and he did what he could to teach them.⁴⁰

Ponomarev’s comrade Alexander Gergel put it like this: ‘I can’t answer for all of my fellow soldiers, but I myself never felt any hatred towards the Afghan people. Every now and again, when the conditions in which I was living became particularly unbearable, it seemed to me that it was the locals who were to blame for everything. I was irritated to the point when I wanted to mow down each and every one of them. But then I saw the people working in their barren fields and I felt sympathy for them all over again. Fury and hatred broke through only when I was in battle. When we fought we were often outnumbered by the enemy. And we rarely got air support. So one could say that we fought as equals: we had the better weapons, but they were better at tactics, fighting as they were in surroundings with which they were familiar.’⁴¹

Quite junior Soviet commanders worked out their own deals with the local villages and mujahedin commanders, and especially of course with those who represented the regime—soldiers, policemen, the head of the village defence force. The relationship was a complex one. Fighting alternated with cooperation and compromise: an informal ceasefire, a willingness to turn a blind eye to smuggling provided weapons were not involved. The tiny detachments in the zastavas had little choice but to get on with the local villagers: they could not otherwise have survived. For that purpose they were supplied with goods for barter and bribe: canned food, sugar, cigarettes, soap, kerosene, matches, used clothing and shoes, and so on.

The 2nd Battalion of the 345th Guards Independent Parachute Assault Regiment kept an eye on the lower reaches of the Pandsher Valley. Their headquarters was in a little fort in Anava. Their doctors would help with simple medicine where they could. They showed films to the villagers and exchanged visits with the local authorities. They tried to mediate in incomprehensible local conflicts. They provided the poorest families with flour, tinned food, vegetable oil, salt, sugar, and condensed milk. Their officers would be invited to dinner by the KhAD representative in Anava to meet the local worthies: the secretary of the party committee, the head of the local administration, the local doctor and teacher. There would be portraits of Lenin and Gorbachev on the wall, generous food, sweets from Pakistan served on delicate porcelain, meat, rice, potatoes, onions, against a background of popular Afghan music from a tape recorder. The mujahedin bombarded the fort in a desultory manner, usually on Sundays, and the Russians responded by shelling the local mountains. The mujahedin did try once to storm one of the battalion’s zastavas, but that was an exception: they were getting their own back because they had recently lost a caravan.⁴²

Much depended on the personality of the local commanders, both of the Soviet soldiers and of the mujahedin bands. Alexander Kartsev was on good terms with the locals. But the commander of the neighbouring zastava was not. His zastava was regularly attacked, while Kartsev and his people were on the whole left alone.

Kartsev used his limited medical skills to improve his relationship with the villagers. Because they had had no contact with modern medicines they reacted well to aspirins, standard antibiotics, and so on. Kartsev’s reputation grew. On one occasion he was kidnapped while he was tending his patients in the local village. He feared the worst, but it turned out that the brother of the local mujahedin commander, Anwar, had accidentally shot himself and Kartsev was needed to cure him. Luckily for him, he succeeded in doing so.

Some months later, two Afghan government BMPs arrived at his zastava carrying several local officials. They had come to negotiate a deal with Anwar. It was a trap: Anwar took them prisoner and threatened to kill them. Colonel Wahid, commanding the local KhAD, asked Kartsev to negotiate the release of the men and the vehicles. Kartsev was escorted to see Anwar, who told him that he would release the BMPs, but the prisoners would be executed, because they were allies of the enemies of Islam. As a gesture to Kartsev, they would not be tortured. Kartsev argued that it was wrong to kill envoys and that reprisals would certainly be taken against the village and the crops. Many of the faithful would die. Anwar thought it over, consulted his colleagues, and let both the prisoners and the BMPs go.⁴³

The relationships worked in other complicated ways. In August 1984 an Afghan tank regiment was involved in a joint operation in Paktia province. One of the regiment’s tanks was blown up by a remote-controlled mine, rolled over and crushed a KhAD officer. A week later an old man and his four sons turned up in the office of the regiment’s Soviet adviser. The brothers were tall and powerful, festooned with weapons like a Christmas tree. They told the adviser that the dead KhAD officer was their brother. He had studied in the Soviet Union, but they were with the mujahedin. The adviser gave them tea, talked about the weather, then showed them on the map where the mine had gone off and gave them the name of the local rebel commander. They thanked him and went off to revenge themselves on the man who had placed the mine which killed their brother.⁴⁴

The Lion of Pandsher

The most elaborate of these ambiguous relationships between the Russians and their enemies was that with Ahmad Shah Masud, who caught the imagination of Afghans and Russians alike with his gallant defence of the Pandsher Valley. Masud, whose name meant ‘the lucky one’, was an authentic and charismatic hero, the most competent and statesmanlike of all the rebel leaders. ‘Pandsher’ was supposed to mean ‘the Five Lions’ and Masud was widely called the ‘Lion of Pandsher’. General Ter-Grigoriants, who fought against him, called him ‘a very worthy opponent and a highly competent organiser of military operations. His opportunities for securing weapons and ammunition were extremely limited, and his equipment was distinctly inferior to that of the Soviet and government forces. But he was nevertheless able to organise the defence of the Pandsher in a way which made it very difficult for us to break through and to take control of the valley.’⁴⁵

Masud came from the kishlak of Jangalak in the Pandsher Valley. His father was a professional army officer from an influential local family. He studied engineering at the Polytechnic Institute in Kabul, where he was drawn towards the Islamic ideas of the fundamentalist Gulbeddin Hekmatyar and the more moderate Burhanuddin Rabbani, and joined the Muslim Youth organisation, which drew much of its inspiration from the Muslim Brothers in the Middle East. The Muslim Youth was not merely a study group. Its members attacked women they considered improperly dressed and brawled with their Maoist and Communist opponents. In the spring of 1973 the Muslim Youth split into the Islamic Party of Afghanistan (Hezbi-I Islami) under Hekmatyar and the Islamic Society of Afghanistan (Jamiat-I Islami) under Rabbani. Masud allied himself with the more moderate Rabbani; but when Hekmatyar bungled an army coup against Daud, he fled with the leading Islamists to Pakistan.

He soon returned to the Pandsher to organise a rising against Daud. His men captured the main administrative centre at Rukha and other key villages. But he mishandled the politics: he failed to secure the support of the local inhabitants, and the criminals he released from the local prison went on the rampage. Once again he sought refuge in Pakistan. But he had learned an important lesson: success in guerrilla warfare depends on having the people on your side.

Masud applied this lesson very carefully during the war against the Russians. He ensured that his people had a minimum of food and shelter, and during the Russian incursions he moved them away from the bombs and the soldiers into the side valleys or up into the high mountains. He stuck closely to the fundamental maxim that irregular fighters should always avoid direct confrontation with their enemies. Until the war against the Russians was over, he did his best to keep clear of the vicious internecine fighting which so often erupted between rival mujahedin forces. He systematically built up institutions of local government and administration, financed with taxes imposed on precious stones mined in the area, land, goods, and on Panshiris living in Kabul. It was always his eventual ambition to win power in Kabul itself and in 1984 he began military operations outside the valley. None of the other mujahedin commanders had the same broad ambitions and the same interest in institution building.⁴⁶

The vicious fighting in the Pandsher Valley in the first years of the war gave the Russians a healthy respect for Masud’s military skills and in January 1983 they negotiated a ceasefire with him which was more or less scrupulously observed by both sides until April 1984. The negotiator was a colonel in the GRU, Anatoli Tkachev, who had been unimpressed with the failure of successive operations in the Pandsher Valley. He spoke first to General Akhromeev, at that time still a member of the Ministry of Defence’s Operational Group in Kabul. ‘I told him that we ought to try to reach an agreement with Ahmad Shah on a ceasefire, since the peaceful population was being killed by artillery and air strikes, and soldiers were being killed by the mujahedin. He answered that all those old men, women, and children were relatives of the rebels, and as for the deaths of our soldiers, they were only doing their duty. If one was killed, ten more could be sent to take his place. Ahmad Shah should be brought to his knees and made to lay down his weapons.’

Tkachev’s idea was, however, supported by the head of the GRU in Afghanistan, and by Akhromeev’s superior, Marshal Sokolov. In reply to a proposal for a meeting which Tkachev sent through agents among the Pansheri refugees in Kabul, Masud laid down the conditions. The meeting was to take place on New Year’s Eve 1983, in the Pandsher Valley on territory controlled by his men. Tkachev was to go to the meeting by night, unarmed, and without an escort.

At nightfall on New Year’s Eve Tkachev set out with his interpreter for the meeting place. As soon as he got there he fired a rocket, the agreed signal, and a group of rebels emerged from the frozen darkness, led by the head of Masud’s counter-intelligence, Tajmudin. Tajmudin asked Tkachev if he would like to rest. ‘No,’ said Tkachev, ‘let’s get a move on. The business is the main thing.’ They marched through the night for about four hours until they reached Bazarak, the place where Tkachev was to meet Masud.

‘The attitude of the mujahedin was quite friendly. They put us up in a well-heated room. There was no electricity, but there was a kerosene lamp and a Soviet stove. The mujahedin looked at us carefully as we began to get undressed, in case we had explosives hidden under our clothes. Then they offered us tea, and brought in mattresses and clean bed linen—all army stuff, with official stamps on it. We went to bed at about four in the morning and slept in the same room as the mujahedin.

‘At breakfast the following morning, we were given all the traditional honours: we were the first to wash our hands and to dry them with a fresh towel, the first to break the bread, and the first to begin eating plov from the common bowl. We were consumed by curiosity as we waited to see Masud: after all, no Soviet officer had seen him before, even in photographs.

‘Exactly at the time laid down, three or four armed men came into the room. These were Masud’s bodyguards. Immediately behind them appeared a young and not very tall man. He was dark-haired, dressed in traditional Afghan costume, and the expression on his face was of concentration and openness: quite unlike the picture painted by our propaganda.

‘After a second’s confusion we exchanged traditional greetings and general conversation in the best Afghan style for about half an hour. Then we were left in the room alone. Masud suggested we get down to business. We began by discussing the history of friendly and traditionally good neighbourly relations between Afghanistan and the Soviet Union. Masud said sadly, “What a great pity that your forces invaded Afghanistan. The leaders of both countries made the greatest possible mistake. You could call it a crime against the Afghan and Soviet peoples.” But as for the Kabul regime, he was and would remain their implacable opponent: once the Soviet forces had left, they would have no future.

‘When we made the points which had been laid down by our superiors, he was a bit surprised that there were no ultimatums, no demands for capitulation. Our central proposal was for a mutual ceasefire in Pandsher and common measures to enable the local population to lead a normal life. We debated for most of the day and the end result was a genuine ceasefire. The civilian population returned to the Pandsher, the situation on the road between Salang and Kabul became very much more quiet, and there was no major military operation in the Pandsher Valley until April 1984.

‘However, this did not suit the Kabul regime, which continually insisted that the Soviet military should take offensive action against Masud. For this reason the ceasefire was broken by us more than once. For example, during one of my subsequent meetings with Masud we heard the sound of helicopters approaching. I said to Masud that as there was a ceasefire we need not worry about the helicopters, but he said that we should go to the shelter just in case. We had barely done that when the helicopters struck the house and half of it was destroyed. Masud pointed to the ruins and said, “International assistance in action.”

‘The next day I was shown an Afghan government intelligence report which said that there had been a strike the previous day, at one o’clock in the afternoon, on a kishlak where Masud and a number of other rebel leaders had been meeting. All had been killed. Masud’s arms had been torn off and his skull split. I said that I had been drinking tea with Masud six hours after the alleged strike: so I must have been drinking with a corpse.’⁴⁷

The Soldiers Off Duty

Even on the larger posts the soldiers’ day was so filled with physical training, compulsory sports, weapons drill, guard duties, and domestic chores that many yearned to go out on operations to relieve the boredom. But some provision was made for them to relax. The bigger bases had, in addition to the ‘Lenin Room’, a library where the soldiers could borrow books and chat up the woman librarian. In the Voentorg military shop, the soldiers could use their exiguous pay to buy cigarettes, confectionery, and occasionally Japanese-made electronic gadgets. For Sergeant Fedorov the shop in the base of the 860th Independent Motor-rifle Regiment in Faisabad was a treasure house: ‘There were things in it that we could never have imagined in the Soviet Union… Eau-de-Cologne, lotion, and other products containing alcohol… were sold under strict control, because some people simply diluted them with water before they drank them; others were clever enough to distil them into proper drinks. Some goods, such as briefcases and sports clothes, were distributed by the political officers to the politically correct or to those who had distinguished themselves in battle. Electrical goods such as tape recorders were held back for the officers. The shortages, real or artificially created, simply led to corruption within the garrison. If you had cheques [military currency] you could get everything, even vodka and champagne.’⁴⁸

But the real treasures were to be found in the bazaars, which bulged with Japanese electronics, fashionable Western clothes, sneakers and jeans, cassette recordings of Western and even Soviet music banned back home. For the shopkeepers at least, the invasion was a business opportunity. For the soldiers, it was their first contact with a market economy, ‘a ticket to another life’.⁴⁹

The problem was that neither the soldiers nor the officers had the wherewithal to satisfy their desires. The officers were paid reasonably well by Soviet standards: a lieutenant would get a lump sum of 250 roubles on finishing his training; his pay thereafter would be 200 roubles a month. By way of comparison, at that time an engineer designing rocket-guidance systems got 250 roubles a month.⁵⁰ But conscripts did very much worse. Some of their salary was paid into Sberbank, the national savings back, which they could draw when they finished their service. They would get small lump-sum payments for injuries. But in the field sergeants only got twelve to eighteen roubles a month. A specialist—a sniper or a machine-gunner—would get nine roubles. Ordinary soldiers were paid a miserable seven roubles. At that time the average (minimum) wage in the Soviet Union was one hundred roubles a month.

So both officers and men turned to various forms of corruption. The 40th Army was not unique: the victorious Allied armies had done much the same in Europe after 1945. But the corruption in the 40th Army was on a heroic scale. Vladimir Snegirev, the correspondent from Komsomolskaya Pravda, called it the grabarmy where everyone grabbed what he could (by a useful coincidence, the Russian word grabarmia combines the noun armia with the verb grabit, to steal or loot).⁵¹ The detachments guarding the Salang Highway would shake down passing Afghan vehicles. Storekeepers and lorry drivers would conspire to take their cut from the cargoes they were transporting. ‘One enterprising soldier,’ wrote Snegirev, ‘detached the spare wheel of my car during the brief half-hour that I was talking to the political officer of a helicopter regiment. The theft took place in broad daylight on the territory of an elite unit, right next to the staff building, practically under the eyes of the sentry. Oho! I thought. If the “internationalist warriors” could so cheerfully pinch anything that was not nailed down even from their own people, I could imagine how they behaved with the Afghans.

‘The quartermasters of military units stationed throughout the country secretly gave the shopkeepers condensed milk, flour, fat, butter, sugar; and with the money they made they would enthusiastically acquire goods which previously they had seen only on the television. The civilian specialists were not far behind them. For a crate of vodka you could get three fur jackets; back in the Soviet Union you could sell the jackets for enough money to buy a second-hand car.’

The soldiers necessarily operated on a more modest scale. ‘If you were cunning you could put together enough money to drink Coca-Cola or Fanta, drinks still unknown in the Soviet Union; or take souvenirs home for your family—a folding umbrella, local jewellery, or (the pinnacle of their dreams) “Montana” jeans.’⁵²

‘Some of the guys brought porcelain, precious stones, jewellery, carpets,’ one private soldier said. ‘They picked them up in battle when they went into the villages, or bought them. For example, the magazine of a Kalashnikov bought you a make-up set for your girlfriend, including mascara, eyeshadow and powder. Of course the cartridges were “cooked”, because a cooked bullet can’t fly, it just kind of spits out the barrel and can’t kill. We’d fill a bucket or a bowl with water, throw in the cartridges, boil them for a couple of hours and sell them the same evening. Everyone traded, officers as well as the rest of us, heroes as well as cowards. Knives, bowls, spoons, forks, mugs, stools, hammers, they all got nicked from the canteen and the barracks. Bayonets disappeared from guns, mirrors from cars, spare parts, medals… You could sell anything, even the rubbish collected from the garrison, full of cans, old newspapers, rusty nails, bits of plywood, and plastic bags. They sold it by the truckload, with the price depending on the amount of scrap metal.’⁵³

Much of this thieving went unpunished. From time to time the authorities would send in a team of military prosecutors and a few exemplary punishments would be handed out. Then things would go on as before—not least because senior officers were also on the take.

In the absence of other opportunities for entertainment, there was, of course, a great deal of drinking in the 40th Army. The officers mostly drank vodka and other spirits, which some consumed in vast quantities.⁵⁴ The soldiers could not normally afford vodka. But they were philosophical: officers were permitted to drink and it was quite natural that they should. After all, they were long-term professionals, whereas the soldiers only had to put up with the army for two years. Anyway, they could make themselves a moderately alcoholic beer called braga, which brewed quickly in the Afghan heat.⁵⁵ They hid it between the wooden lining and the canvas wall of their tents, or in the external fuel and water tanks of their armoured vehicles. And they had their drugs, mostly marijuana, which they called chars. A particular and rather rare delicacy was tea laced with hashish. They would trade drugs and drink with soldiers from other units, or buy them off the Afghans for cash, or in exchange for military goods of various kinds. They would share a joint or quench their thirst with braga on the way to battle, though most had the sense to shake off the influence before the fighting actually began.

There are no reliable statistics about the extent of the drug-taking. Some veterans deny that it was widespread, at least in the elite units, and one has to aim off for the boasting of young men anxious to show how tough they were. Some soldiers became addicts, but most abandoned the habit when they were eventually demobilised. Two who did not were rescued from Pakistan in 1983 by the journalist Masha Slonim at the behest of the Daily Mail newspaper. Oleg and Igor both came from Ukraine. Oleg was a simple peasant and not at all bright. Igor was a Russian: he was comparatively sophisticated and wrote poetry. They had deserted because Oleg had accidentally killed a comrade and was under investigation, while Igor had heard that his girlfriend was going out with another man. They broke into the armoury of their unit near Kandahar, stole some weapons, and set out to walk to Pakistan. They had no map, hardly any water, and were soon captured by the mujahedin. They were taken to Peshawar, installed in a villa, and treated reasonably well. But they needed to shoot up, their captors gave them no syringes, and they ran away to get back to Afghanistan to find some. When they were recaptured, their captors chained them to a bed, and there they were kept, thin and unhealthy, until they were released to Masha Slonim. By then they were both in a dreadful state.

On the plane to London they suffered serious withdrawal symptoms and Masha barely managed to keep them under control. They were then taken to a villa in Surrey, where they were to be interviewed for TV. They were in too bad a state and had to go to a London clinic, where their addiction was successfully brought under control. They were placed with a Ukrainian family in London, where they frequented a Russian restaurant in London, the Balalaika. A constant visitor there was a nice man from the Soviet Embassy, who regularly bought them drinks. One fine day Igor and Oleg disappeared. They turned up at a press conference in the embassy, saying they wanted to go home and denouncing everyone they had met in Britain as intelligence agents—except Masha. After the two went back to the Soviet Union the Daily Mail reported that they had been shot. It was not so. Ivan wrote to say he was alive and well, though Oleg never surfaced again.⁵⁶

Guitar and Kalashnikov

The soldiers took their guitars to Afghanistan, and they wrote and improvised a great deal of music and poetry, some of permanent value. These songs and poems reflect the history of the war: from a confident belief in the rightness of the cause, through the sounds of battle and the loss of comrades, to the disillusion and bitterness of failure.

Some popular songs were written by established artists who visited the bigger bases from time to time. Alexander Rozenbaum’s song ‘The Black Tulip’, about the planes which flew the coffins of dead soldiers back to the Soviet Union, and ‘We Will Return’, about Soviet prisoners of war, remained popular long after the war was over. Enterprising Afghan traders imported from the West recordings of songs that were frowned upon in the Soviet Union: the music of the Beatles and ABBA, and the songs of the immensely popular Soviet singer Bulat Okudzhava (1924–97), whose pieces hovered just this side of dissent and were not much appreciated by the authorities.

But the soldiers’ attitude towards the professional singers was ambivalent. However eloquently these people sang, they had not seen battle themselves. Their music was artificial, constructed for effect, and over it, some thought, hung an atmosphere of commercial exploitation. For the real thing the soldiers made their own music on the guitars they had taken with them to the war. Or they listened to the songs of the soldier-bards, the people who had shared their trials, songs which became very popular, to the consternation of the authorities. The songs were banned by the political censorship, and the customs officers on the frontier cracked down heavily on attempts to bring taped versions into the Soviet Union. None of this stopped the songs from circulating throughout the 40th Army.

The Afgantsy were acutely aware that their fathers and grandfathers had fought gloriously in the war against Hitler and there are self-conscious overtones almost of rivalry between the generations in the earlier songs. They were influenced by the songs of Vladimir Vysotski (1938–80), who had not fought in that war but had caught its spirit in many songs. They fastened on the poems of Kipling and his picture of Afghanistan, its people, and the fighting there. The authorities were less enthusiastic because Kipling was, they considered, an apologist for British imperialism in Afghanistan. Around the middle of the war a new theme emerged: nostalgia and sympathy for the White Guards, the soldiers who fought on the losing side of the civil war after the revolution in 1917 and who had upheld the heroism and discipline of Russian arms even as their country fell apart around them. The bards picked up the romances of those days about love and war and honour even in defeat. ‘[W]hy in the years of my youth did nobody publicly speak of the self-sacrifice of the White generals?’ wondered Alexander Karpenko, a bard and military interpreter. ‘And at this point my thoughts about the White Army’s role in the fate of Russia came to mingle with what was happening in Afghanistan. The prohibitions and silence which surrounded the White idea also stimulated the creative energies of the Afgantsy, including my own.’⁵⁷ Towards the end, the mood of the songs began to change. Nostalgia was replaced by bitter songs about the sense of futility and defeat which settled on the 40th Army as the country in whose name it had been fighting began to fall apart.

Most of the soldier-bards were officers, many from the special forces. Sergei Klimov wrote one of the first songs, about the explosion in the Afghan government communication centre which triggered off the attacks in Kabul in December 1979.⁵⁸ But Yuri Kirsanov is often regarded as the dean of the bards. He served with a special forces group called Karpaty, an offshoot of Kaskad. He joined the KGB in 1976 and when he was posted to Afghanistan in 1980 he took his guitar with him. He was stationed in Shindand. He found—bizarrely—that travelling on operations in a BTR stimulated his creative ingenuity. He and a colleague systematically recorded the sounds of Afghanistan on a small tape recorder—the call of the muezzin, the rattle of armoured vehicles, the noise of battle and the cry of the jackal—and he used them as the introduction to his own songs. These he recorded in ‘studio’ conditions—in the regimental bathhouse, where he worked at night, when the electric current was more or less stable and the noise of war had died away. He composed to express the emotions of war and the soldiers’ hopes for a safe return. ‘Kirsanov’s songs succeeded in doing what the professional artists were unable to do,’ remarked one journalist. ‘They preserved the real and genuine truth of the Afghan war.’⁵⁹

Igor Morozov studied in the prestigious Bauman Technical University and then worked for a while as an engineer in the defence industry, where he helped to develop the improved model of the infantry warhorse, the BMP-2 infantry fighting vehicle. But then his father, who had been in military intelligence during the Second World War, persuaded him to go into the First Directorate of the KGB, the foreign intelligence department, which he joined in August 1977. He was sent to Afghanistan in 1981 after two months’ special training, served for a while in Kunduz, and was then posted to command the detachment of Kaskad in Faisabad in 1982. The team consisted of three officers and a handful of soldiers. They lived in a villa on the edge of the town guarded by KhAD. They had three BTRs, of which only one worked, three GAZ jeeps, two machine guns, two mortars, and three tons of ammunition. Neither the team commander nor his deputy spoke the local languages, and for three months they were without an interpreter. No one knew what the situation was in the province. The soldiers were members of the KGB’s frontier force (pogranichniki), and they were on the books of the 40th Army for pay and rations. But the three officers depended on headquarters in Moscow, who simply forgot about them. Their pay was six months in arrears and they had to scrounge their rations from the soldiers. They had to get their experience from the soldiers as well: the soldiers had been in Afghanistan for six months, they could speak a few words of the language, and had some idea of the situation.⁶⁰

By then Morozov was already a committed songwriter: ironically, ‘Batalionnaya Razvedka’ (Battalion Reconnaissance), which he wrote in honour of his father in 1975, later became one of his most popular ‘Afghan’ songs. He had quickly concluded that ‘the patriotic songs and music recommended by the authorities were not understood or accepted by the soldiers, because they absolutely failed to reflect either the spirit or the character of the war. The first signs of moral and spiritual decay were already beginning to appear in the Limited Contingent.’ He believed that ‘A country’s songs tell you what is ailing it.’ He began by playing Kirsanov’s songs to his soldiers, but soon began to compose for himself. When the fierce sandstorms whipped up by the wind which the soldiers called the ‘Afganets’ blew for days at a time, operations would be called off and Morozov would use the break to write. Soon his songs, too, were circulating throughout the 40th Army: ‘The Return’ and ‘We’re Leaving’, about the final departure of the 40th Army; ‘The Convoy from Tulukan to Faisabad’, ‘Rain in the Mountains of Afghanistan’, ‘The Song of the Bullet’, about the fighting; ‘Guitar and Kalashnikov’, about the relationship between art and war; songs from an earlier age such as the 1930s hit ‘The Blue Balloon’.

Morozov finally left Afghanistan over the Salang Pass with the parachutists of the Vitebsk Division in 1989. Valeri Vostrotin’s 345th Guards Independent Parachute Assault Regiment, which was guarding the pass, is said to have started every day with Morozov’s bitter song ‘We’re Leaving’. Morozov and his friends, by now elderly colonels in retirement, were still performing their songs two decades after the war was over.⁶¹

Most of the soldiers of the 40th Army were, of course, only too anxious to get away from the monotony and the fighting, to return home as soon as they could, to resume the lives which had been disrupted when they were issued with their call-up papers. Some—Lieutenant Kartsev and Sergeant Sergei Morozov—were to remember the years in Afghanistan as the best of their lives. More than one felt a pang as they left for the Soviet Union. ‘Suddenly they understood with blinding clarity that over there, in the future, there was nothing. All was dark, impenetrable, a vacuum. If you shouted, there would be no echo; if you hurled a stone, you would not hear it land. Life was carrying them into that emptiness, unmapped, unstoppable. From now on, everything lay in the past.’⁶²

Fighting, like soldiering, differs little from time to time or place to place. It is something that cannot be properly understood by those who have not been there. Even among the soldiers themselves, there is ‘a gulf between men just returned from action, and those who have not been in the show, as unbridgeable as that between the sober and the drunk’. The Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan fought for the same reasons as the British soldiers on the Somme, the Russians on the Eastern Front, the French in Indo-China and Algeria, and the Americans in Vietnam and Iraq: to do a job, for the sake of their fellow soldiers, to kill rather than be killed. Sometimes they broke. Sometimes they preferred a firefight to the frustration and boredom of soldiering. They rarely cared about the wider political implications of their war—their horizons were bounded by their platoon, their company, or their battalion. They counted the days until they could go home; and when they got home, some missed the comradeship and the rush of adrenalin. Life in battle had a meaning which civilian life could not match. An American soldier who fought in Afghanistan two decades later said, ‘People back home think we drink because of the bad stuff, but that’s not true… we drink because we miss the good stuff.’¹

Most of the fighting in Afghanistan was on a comparatively small scale: minor operations commanded by lieutenants, captains, and majors. The nearest the 40th Army got to real old-fashioned war was when it conducted large-scale operations to clear out a rebel stronghold, relieve rebel pressure on a town, or close the border with Pakistan. This was where the colonels and the generals had their chance to exercise their skill in the art of war. These sledgehammer blows involved thousands of troops, hundreds of armoured vehicles and helicopters, massive air and artillery strikes. They continued for weeks at a time and had few lasting results.

The Weapons

The men of the 40th Army were generously equipped with sophisticated weapons. Some achieved the status of icons—the Kalashnikov automatic rifle, the infantry fighting vehicle, the BMP (Boyevaya Mashina Pekhoty), and the battle helicopter, the Mi-24. But the weapons, like the men, had been intended for use against the armies of NATO. They now had to be adapted to a quite different kind of war. Determined attempts were made to improve the weapons systems. Designers and engineers regularly visited Afghanistan to listen to complaints and suggestions from the soldiers.² Some of the weapons the Russians brought with them turned out to be irrelevant—heavy anti-aircraft weapons, for example, useful for fighting an enemy air force, but not much use against partisans—and were sent back to the Soviet Union.

The backbone of the Soviet army was the motor-rifle unit, motorised infantry which travelled across the battlefield in armoured personnel carriers, BTRs (Bronetransportyor), which had a crew of three and carried seven soldiers; and in the ubiquitous BMP, which also had a crew of three and could carry eight soldiers. The BMP was an advanced vehicle for its time, but its cannon could not be elevated sufficiently to engage rebels shooting from the mountains above: this defect was rectified in a later model, the BMP-2. It was designed to resist small-arms fire, but it was very vulnerable to mines and anti-tank rockets. If a large mine went off under a BMP, it would drive the floor up against the deck, crushing those inside. The soldiers often preferred to ride on the outside: you were exposed to the bullets, but if the vehicle hit a mine you had some chance of being thrown off and surviving. The driver, of course, had no choice.

The Mi-24 attack helicopter, which the soldiers called the ‘Crocodile’, stars in most films about the Afghan war. It carried a crew of three and eight passengers or four stretchers. A sinister-looking beast, it could mount a variety of formidable weapons to use against people, buildings, and armoured vehicles. The Mi-8 transport helicopter, the ‘Bee’, was the workhorse of the 40th Army. It came into service in 1967: more were said to have been produced than any other helicopter in the world. With a crew of three, it could carry twenty-four passengers, or twelve stretchers, or a load of three thousand kilograms. Little more than a decade after the Soviet war was over, the Americans hired Mi-8s to supply their special forces because they were particularly well adapted to operate in the high mountains of eastern Afghanistan. The aircraft were flown by Russians—sometimes by the same men who had flown them during the Soviet war. But this time they were flown not by military crews but—because Russia was now a capitalist country—by the employees of a commercial company called, appropriately enough, Vertical-T. When one of these helicopters was shot down in 2008, the Russian Ambassador in Kabul contacted the Taliban for the return of the bodies. ‘You mean they were Russians?’ said the Taliban. ‘We thought they were Americans. Of course you can have them.’³

The soldiers’ personal weapons were good, and they too were steadily improved throughout the war. Their other equipment was less suitable. They were issued at first with uncomfortable uniforms in the wrong camouflage pattern, a clumsy flak jacket which weighed twenty kilograms until a newer model got it down to twelve, a skimpy cotton sleeping bag that let the water in, a heavy rucksack, and boots ill-adapted to marching across mountains. They had no proper identity discs, but kept their personal details in an empty cartridge case hung round their necks, just as their fathers and grandfathers had done in the Great Patriotic War.⁴

So they improvised. At headquarters in Kabul the dress code was rigidly enforced. But out in the field the soldiers wore whatever worked. They sewed their own ‘brassieres’, lifchiki, to carry spare magazines, grenades, signal rockets, and other paraphernalia. Instead of heavy army boots, officers and sometimes even soldiers wore light trainers of Soviet manufacture, or foreign ones bought or looted from the Afghan dukany (shops) or captured from the enemy.⁵ A great prize was a lightweight sleeping bag, acquired in the same way.

The elite forces were much more colourful. They celebrated fearsome drinking rituals before they went out on operations and wore the most picturesque rig even on parade: ‘We were wearing the clothes we fought in. A few were wearing SpetsNaz overalls. Some were wearing the “afganka” jacket. Most were dressed in a canvas windcheater [shtormovka], tank crew overalls, long Afghan shirts and baggy trousers [shalvary]. Our equipment was just as varied. Some had captured Kalashnikovs of Arab or Chinese manufacture. Some had Soviet automatics, with a sniperscope or night sight attached and a silencer. Some had modernised versions of the Kalashnikov sub-machine gun [PKMP] or self-loading carbines [SKS], instead of our Dragunov sniper rifles. The sergeant major had a silenced Stechkin pistol as well as his PKMP. We looked like the crew of a pirate ship.’⁶

The soldiers operated as beasts of burden, as soldiers have done throughout history. Even on raids they were supposed to carry their weapons, helmets, a flak jacket, a sleeping bag, a tent, dry rations for three days, bottles of water, up to six hundred rounds for their automatic rifles, two shrapnel and two attack grenades, signal rockets and smoke flares, and one or two 82mm mortar rounds. The whole lot weighed more than forty kilograms. The signallers carried radios, while the mortar and machine-gun crews carried the ponderous and awkward parts of their heavy weapons.⁷ When he first joined the signal platoon of the 1st Battalion of the 860th Independent Motor-rifle Regiment in Bakharak, Andrei Ponomarev remembered, he was neither strong nor fit enough for the job. Carrying the radio in addition to his personal kit, weapons, and ammunition was a nightmare. But you could never admit that you weren’t up to it: you would be despised and probably beaten by the other soldiers. During his first operation he gritted his teeth, on the edge of tears, and struggled on. Some of the others eventually gave him a hand, carrying the radio in turns while he continued to operate it.⁸

Not surprisingly, even the soldiers of the motor-rifle units, when they went on raids, especially at night, often left their helmets and flak jackets behind, and took the lighter weapons and no more than ten magazines of ammunition.⁹ Their senior officers never cottoned on to that: they were still saying long after the war that man for man the Soviet soldier could not match the Afghan fighter because of his lack of training and his clumsy equipment.¹⁰

The Enemy

The mujahedin against whom the soldiers of the 40th Army and their Afghan allies fought for nine years were formidable warriors, highly motivated, brave, determined, skilled in guerrilla warfare. Some were professionals—army officers who had turned against the government. Others were driven by religious passion, the desire for revenge, an ingrained unwillingness to do what the government told them to do. Some fought for money. Some who had been driven out of their homes by war had little alternative. Since for the most part they were drawn from the ordinary people of the villages, it was hard for the Russian soldiers to distinguish between friend and foe. A man working in his field might shoot at you as you drove past. The apparently friendly people in a village might direct you along a road which they knew led to an ambush. Faced with these lethal uncertainties, soldiers often shot first and asked questions afterwards, and their commanders would call in an air or artillery strike on a village if they encountered opposition without worrying too much about collateral damage.

But the insurgents, like the Kabul government itself, suffered from ‘the fundamental characteristic of Afghan society—its incoherence’.¹¹ For much of the war there were seven main mujahedin parties, based in Pakistan, with representatives inside Afghanistan itself, who organised the supply of money and arms to the fighters. In May 1985 these parties formed themselves into a loosely organised Alliance of Seven. But they remained rivals rather than partners, and after the Russians left Afghanistan in 1989 the tensions between them broke into open civil war. Like the Afghan Communist Party these groupings had their origins in the university politics of the 1970s, where their leaders, such as Rabbani, the leader of the moderate Islamist Jamiat-i Islami, and Hekmatyar, the leader of the radical Islamist Hezb-i Islami, had already made a mark. All were Sunnis, and all were Pushtun, except for Rabbani’s Jamiat-i Islami, who were Tajiks and were led inside Afghanistan by Ahmad Shah Masud. (See Annex 3, ‘The Alliance of Seven and Its Leaders’, p.346.)

Field commanders, nominally answering to their party leaders in Pakistan, recruited and organised their fighters in Afghanistan and in the refugee camps. Individual warlords raised fighting bands for the glory of God or for their own glory, for local power or for loot. Their loyalties were uncertain and they would change sides in pursuit of personal advantage. Some individuals happily sold their services to the highest bidder. Internecine warfare between the fighting bands inside Afghanistan resulted in thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of deaths among the guerrillas and the civilian population.¹²

Figures for the number of guerrilla fighters can only be estimates. The total number in 1980–82 might have reached 250,000. In the last full year of the war, between 35,000 and 175,000 might have been operating on any given day. The group led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar is said to have consisted of 40,570 men, one-third of the total.¹³ Such figures give an idea of the order of magnitude, but are not backed by hard evidence.

The Pakistani military intelligence organisation, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) did what they could to monopolise outside support for the resistance. They set up training camps on the Afghan border, and insisted that weapons and money provided by the CIA and others should pass through their hands. Their aim was to secure a regime in Kabul that was not only friendly to Pakistan, but also to their own belief in Islamist government. So they helped those commanders, such as the Pushtun Hekmatyar, who shared their religious and political views, and gave scant support to those who did not, such as the Tajik Masud. The French and British recognised Masud’s importance and did what they could to help him. It was not all that much, because their resources could not begin to match those of the Americans.

The successes of the mujahedin grew from the start. The chief of Soviet army intelligence in Afghanistan reported in the middle of 1980 that ‘If in April this year there were 38 terrorist acts, and 63 people killed, then in May there were 112 terrorist attacks, killing 201 people. In a directive of the Islamic Party of Afghanistan… the rebels are instructed to continue to avoid direct armed confrontation with regular forces, and to camouflage themselves among the civilian population’.¹⁴ The mujahedin regularly launched rocket attacks on Kabul itself, infiltrating the outer line of defences despite the best efforts of the Soviet and Afghan forces. One of their greatest successes occurred in August 1986, when rockets fired by a time fuse hit a major ammunition dump outside Kabul, destroying forty thousand tons of ammunition at a cost to the Soviets estimated by the Pakistanis at $250 million. Two years later, in April 1988, another large dump exploded, this time outside Rawalpindi, in Pakistan. Ten thousand tons of ammunition, plastic explosive, rockets, and other ordnance blew up, killing a hundred people and injuring another thousand. The timing seemed significant, just as the Geneva Agreements were about to be signed and the Russians were preparing for the first phase of their withdrawal. The KGB had considerable respect for the ability of their colleagues in the KhAD to conduct special operations and believed they were responsible. Pakistani intelligence officers blamed the Russians. The more paranoid even suspected the Americans. The most likely explanation is that it was an accident.¹⁵

At first the insurgents were not as well armed as they later became. The professional soldiers among them knew how to operate armoured vehicles and aircraft, but did not acquire such sophisticated weapons until after the Soviets had left; then they used them against one another. But very soon, with the assistance of the Americans, the Pakistanis and others, they began to get mortars, mines, heavy machine guns, and radios, many of them of Soviet design imported from China, Egypt, and elsewhere. And even the old British Lee-Enfield rifles, which they used from the start, and which the Soviet soldiers called ‘Boers’ from some vague notion that they had been used during the Boer War, were more accurate than the Soviet automatic rifle and far outranged it. Soldiers began to die at the hands of distant snipers, and panic spread among them which their officers had difficulty in countering.¹⁶

The Russians and their Afghan allies used helicopters and fighter bombers to destroy villages suspected of harbouring rebels, to supply isolated garrisons, and to place their troops in ambush. But the mujahedin were not defenceless against aerial attack. In skilful hands, their Soviet-designed heavy machine guns could bring down even the armoured assault helicopters. Two or three years into the war they obtained—with CIA assistance—the very effective but too cumbersome Swiss Oerlikon light anti-aircraft gun. They made some spectacular attacks on Soviet and Afghan airbases, destroying a number of aircraft on the ground. From 1984 they began to use Chinese and Soviet anti-aircraft missiles and the dubiously effective British Blowpipe. The Blowpipes found their way to Afghanistan through a variety of covert sources so that their provenance could not be proved. The missile was used by both sides in the Falklands War, where one British officer remarked that it was like ‘trying to shoot pheasants with a drainpipe’. Senior Soviet officers such as General Varennikov and helicopter pilots such as Boris Zhelezin nevertheless regarded the weapon with a certain respect.¹⁷

But what the mujahedin really wanted was the American Stinger, a sophisticated portable rocket launcher which could seek out and hit an aircraft at a range of three miles, at altitudes between six hundred and twelve thousand five hundred feet.¹⁸ The US military opposed supplying Stingers to the mujahedin since they feared—correctly, as it turned out—that the weapons would leak to the Russians and others. It was not until February 1986 that the Americans finally decided to supply some two hundred and forty launchers and a thousand missiles.¹⁹

The first Stingers were fired on 26 September 1986, when a Soviet-trained engineer called Ghaffur shot down three Mi-24 helicopters that were coming in to land at Jalalabad.²⁰ The initial impact on Soviet tactics and morale was considerable. Alla Smolina had just arrived in Jalalabad to work in the office of the military procurator when the three helicopters were shot down. ‘The old hands said that previously there had been nothing frightening about flying around Afghanistan,’ she wrote later. ‘Soviet and Afghan planes travelled for all sorts of reasons all over the country at all hours of the day and at all altitudes. Jalalabad was one of the few places where roses grew in the winter. So the Kabul garrison sent planes there at the end of every year to collect roses for their New Year parties.’

Smolina’s flight into Jalalabad was the last to land in the old carefree way. Thereafter planes flew at night if possible, approached the airfield at a safe height of several thousand feet, and landed in a tight, quick spiral. You felt, she said, as if you were in a spacecraft, leaving your insides behind you. Parachutes became obligatory, though it was hard to see how they could be used if your plane was hit by a rocket. And anyway most of them were too big if you were a woman. People cut their air travel to a minimum. But if you travelled by land you risked being ambushed. Some people gave up travelling altogether. Others still flew to the base, either on business or to enjoy its various attractions: a shop, a club, a hairdresser, even a discotheque run by a paratroop lieutenant.²¹

The Soviets were now forced to refine the tactics they had developed against anti-aircraft missiles and heavy machine guns. Their aircraft fired infrared flares to confuse the Stingers’ guidance systems. Fixed-wing aircraft flew above sixteen thousand five hundred feet—beyond the range of the Stinger. Soviet bombing became even more inaccurate, and even more destructive of civilian lives and property.²² Helicopters flew very low among the mountains, because the Stinger was unreliable except against a background of sky. Most transport flights took place at night. These measures successfully reduced losses. But they were not infallible. One aircraft was hit over Khost at a height of thirty thousand feet, though it managed to land with a large hole in the tailplane.²³

The Soviet Minister of Defence promised that the first person to get hold of a Stinger would be made a Hero of the Soviet Union. There are two versions of what then happened. One is that, acting on intelligence, a special forces detachment under Major Sergeev, flying in four battle helicopters, successfully intercepted a motorcycle caravan on 5 January 1987. The mujahedin fired two Stingers at them, which missed, and another was captured intact.²⁴ A more colourful version is that the successful commander was called Major Belov and that he was given the lesser Order of the Military Red Banner when it was discovered at the last minute that ‘he had a drink problem and was brusque in his attitude to his superiors’.²⁵

The Russians also set out to buy Stingers from the rebels: the going price was $3,000.²⁶ The Iranians did the same, and displayed several Stingers during a military parade in September 1987 which were allegedly sold to them by two mujahedin commanders for $1 million.²⁷ After the war was over, the CIA were still sufficiently worried to try to buy back unused Stingers at twice their original cost. But few were recovered, and between two hundred and four hundred remained at large.²⁸

Large claims have been made about the military and political significance of the Stingers.²⁹ According to official Russian figures, the 40th Army lost 113 fixed-wing aircraft and 333 helicopters during the course of the war; by comparison, the Americans lost 5,086 helicopters during the Vietnam War.³⁰ After the initial panic, the Soviet counter-measures reduced the loss rate to much what it had been before the Stingers arrived. No convincing evidence has appeared from Russian sources that the Stingers affected the political decision-making process in Moscow, or that they had much beyond an immediate tactical effect on the Soviet conduct of military operations. Gorbachev took the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan a full year before the first Stinger was fired.³¹

The Salang Highway

The one battle the Soviets could never afford to lose was the battle to keep open the Salang Highway. It was along this road that three-quarters of the 40th Army’s supplies were brought from the Soviet Union. Huge supply columns, as many as eight hundred vehicles, moved from the great logistics base in Khairaton, just on the Afghan side of the Amu Darya River, for more than 280 miles over the Hindu Kush to Kabul.³²

The road starts in the fertile plains of the north, and then winds its way up increasingly bleak mountains to Pul-i Khumri, which is about the halfway point. It then continues south until it passes through the Salang Tunnel, built by the Soviets in the 1960s about seventy-five miles north of Kabul to provide an all-weather route through the Hindu Kush. The tunnel is three miles long and when it was built it was, at eleven thousand feet above sea level, the highest tunnel in the world. Even today it is an intimidating place, narrow, unlined, ill-lit and ill-ventilated, just wide enough for two lorries to pass, with the raw rock seemingly pressing down upon your head. In the course of the war, the 40th Army moved 8 million tons of supplies through this tunnel.

It normally took about fifteen minutes to negotiate the tunnel, though the big convoys took much longer. In November 1982 an Afghan government convoy broke down inside the tunnel, blocking the way for the Soviet column following behind it. It was very cold and the drivers left their engines running. Sixty-four Soviet soldiers and 112 Afghan soldiers died of carbon monoxide poisoning. This was not the first such case: twelve soldiers died in the tunnel in December 1979 and two more in spring of the following year. Indeed, people were still dying in the tunnel even after it had been rebuilt and reopened in 2002. After the disaster of 1982 a much stricter traffic control was instituted and there were no more incidents on that scale.³³ But it could still be a very dangerous place, even in peacetime: in the winter of 2010 over 160 people were killed when the Salang was struck by a series of avalanches.

On the southern side of the tunnel the road descends in broad serpentines, dominated by bleak cliffs and mountains on one side and falling steeply away on the other: ambush country. After passing through scattered villages, the road comes to the first major town, Charikar, known for its grapes and its pottery, where Captain Codrington and his Gurkhas were massacred during the First Anglo-Afghan War. Lesser roads branch out from Charikar, westwards to Bamyan and eastwards to Bagram, Afghanistan’s main airbase, and the Pandsher Valley, the base for Ahmad Shah Masud’s formidable guerrilla fighters. The fertile Shomali Plain begins here, a green zone of walled villages, tangled vineyards, small fields, and intricate irrigation ditches running close to the road for about sixty miles all the way to Kabul and to the outskirts of the great airbase at Bagram. It is an ideal place for snipers, the laying of ambushes, and the planting of roadside bombs and mines. Soviet troops went into the villages of the Shomali Plain at their peril. In one incident, a praporshchik (warrant officer) took the short cut from Kabul to Bagram through the green zone. The mujahedin waited until he and his column were well inside, then shot them to pieces. The vehicles were destroyed and only one wounded man managed to get back to the main road. When the Russians went to retrieve the bodies and wreak their revenge, they lost a helicopter.

A pipeline ran alongside the Salang Highway, carrying fuel oil from the Soviet Union, and followed the road as far as the airbase at Bagram. A similar pipeline ran along the western highway to Shindand.³⁴ Small detachments from the Pipeline Brigade—seven men under a conscript sergeant—guarded and maintained the pumping stations along the route. If there were an incident or a mechanical failure, day or night, they would go out to investigate. It was not a glamorous service. But it was dangerous, and in 1986 nearly a third of one Pipeline Battalion was decorated.³⁵

The Russians cut down trees and destroyed villages along their main supply routes to deny cover to potential ambushers. They placed their zastavas close enough together to give mutual support or on heights overlooking the road. They positioned larger garrisons at intervals of about twelve miles, with a mobile reserve of motor-rifle troops, armour, and artillery. Before a convoy set out along a particularly vulnerable route, special forces and paratroopers travelled by forced march or by helicopter to occupy the heights before the mujahedin could get there and to block off their line of retreat. One column, which was sent to supply the garrison at Chagcharan in the mountains midway between Herat and Kabul, consisted of 250 army lorries and several hundred civilian vehicles with goods for the civilian population. It was supported by four motor-rifle battalions, five reconnaissance companies, two troops of tanks, a battery of artillery, and thirty-two helicopters.³⁶

A typical skirmish occurred on the Salang Pass on 16 October 1986, shortly after midday, when a column of oil tankers, more than a mile long, was attacked by several hundred of Masud’s fighters from the Pandsher Valley, accompanied, it is said, by a Western TV crew out for some spectacular footage. A BTR escorting the column was put out of action in the first salvo of mortar shells. A number of tankers were set on fire and the drivers bailed out to take cover.

Ruslan Aushev (1954–) was just descending towards Charikar with a small armoured task force (bron-egruppa) of seven armoured vehicles and two tanks when he heard the firing. He had already been made a Hero of the Soviet Union for action in Afghanistan. Now he reversed his column to go to the aid of the stricken convoy. They passed the wrecked BTR and a few tankers which had escaped from the ambush. On a narrow stretch, two burning oil tankers had slewed across the road and had blocked it entirely. Aushev tried to push them off the road with his tank. When the tank itself risked catching fire, he blew the two vehicles away with a couple of shells fired at point-blank range.

What was left of the convoy was trapped higher up. The young lieutenant commanding the next zastava, Nikolai Kiselev, radioed that he was sending his small force to help. Between them Aushev’s bron-egruppa and Kiselev’s little force rescued the survivors. But Kiselev was killed and Aushev severely wounded.³⁷

Though not as important as the Salang route, the western highway which led from Kushka in Uzbekistan to Herat, Shindand, and Kandahar also had to be kept open. It was less vulnerable than the Salang, since much of it lay across open desert with little cover for ambushes. But it was never safe. Major Vyacheslav Izmailov commanded a transport battalion based in Shindand which ran columns between Herat and Kandahar. The journey usually took three days. Major Izmailov’s columns might consist of up to two hundred lorries, escorted by three or four BTRs and occasionally tanks. They hardly ever had air cover.

Perhaps because he came from Muslim Dagestan and understood the local customs better, Major Izmailov never had any serious trouble. You needed to treat the Afghans with respect, he said: you drove through their villages at two or three miles an hour, you didn’t drive away from accidents, you talked to the village elders. If there were some incident, the Afghans would take payment in cash or kind in compensation, even for a death. But if the Russians refused to accept responsibility or give compensation, then the Afghans would exact their compensation in blood, mining the routes and ambushing the convoys. Through their agents, the mujahedin always knew who was in command of a convoy. They did not attack those who played the game.

Compensation could include sacks of rice or money for the funerals. When Izmailov’s men once casually shot up and destroyed a couple of disabled Afghan trucks by the roadside the local leaders told him that the truck owners risked losing their livelihoods. They would be left with nothing to do but to join the mujahedin. Izmailov arranged a complicated deal which involved siphoning fuel out of his tankers, passing it through a third party to the local leaders, and so on to the truck owners.

Another transport battalion followed a different policy and suffered a different fate. Colonel Kretenin always led his columns at great speed through populated areas as well as open countryside, raising clouds of dust, not stopping for accidents. The Afghans decided to teach him a lesson. In February 1987 he set out with a column from Kandahar to Shindand. Izmailov followed more slowly. Ninety miles out from Kandahar, he heard on his radio that Kretenin was under fire. By the time he got to the scene most of the convoy had been destroyed and Kretenin was dead.

The Soviet supply lines were never seriously threatened. But the convoys inevitably suffered heavy losses from time to time. One column destined for Faisabad in the north-east started out from the Soviet Union with twelve hundred vehicles, but only seven hundred reached their destination. Another column took eleven days to cover twenty-five miles.³⁸ Many of the columns were organised by a joint Afghan-Soviet company, Afsotr, which was still in existence in 2008. The lorry drivers were civilians and many of them died: more than nine thousand received Soviet or Afghan awards during the war. More than eleven thousand lorries and fuel tankers were lost, and the mountain passes and valleys of Afghanistan were still littered with their carcasses twenty years after the war had ended.³⁹

Operations

The Russians did not of course stay perpetually on the defensive; they took the war to the enemy as well. In September 1983 Colonel Rokhlin, the commander the 860th Independent Motor-rifle Regiment in Faisabad, was sacked for mismanaging a major operation against a concentration of mujahedin which cost fifteen killed and seventy-eight wounded, and went down in regimental legend as the ‘Bakharak Massacre’. He was replaced by Colonel Valeri Sidorov, a well-connected officer whose father taught in the General Staff College and whose mother was a member of the Supreme Soviet. Sidorov was not popular. He was courageous and led from the front, but his soldiers found him hard-driving and ambitious, careless of their lives as he devised ever more ingenious and dangerous operations to enhance his career. The shadow under which the regiment was living after the ‘Bakharak Massacre’ spurred his ambition still further: he would, by his deeds, restore its reputation.

His first big operation, in January 1984, was aimed at rooting out the guerrillas around the village of Karamugul, a few miles along a gorge from Faisabad. The whole regiment would be involved, including the cooks and drivers. The grandfathers who were expecting to go home in a matter of weeks were particularly unhappy at the news: it was a rule of thumb among the soldiers that courage begins to run out as the prospect of survival draws closer.

After a rousing speech by the colonel, they moved out early in the morning. An hour later they were clambering up on to the plateau on the western side of the gorge. The temperature was just above zero, it was raining, and by two o’clock they were soaked. Because of the weather they had no air cover.

By five o’clock in the morning Karamagul was effectively blockaded. The temperature had fallen to between minus fifteen and minus twenty degrees, and officers and men were huddling together for warmth. The soldiers from the reconnaissance company—the razvedchiki—went into Karamugul at six. The village was empty by then, though the stoves were still warm: both the villagers and the insurgents had got out in good time. There was no point in hanging about and at eight o’clock the troops began to withdraw. They were immediately set upon by mujahedin. Only the razvedchiki managed to get to their BMPs and pull out.

The third platoon covered the retreat on the plateau. They were more heavily armed than the mujahedin, but the latter had the advantage of numbers and mobility. The cooks and the drivers, together with some wounded and men from the mortar battery, were ordered straight back to the regimental base under a praporshchik, Sandirescu. They started off across the plateau, but after they were caught in crossfire Sandirescu took them down into the gorge which led to the base, hoping that would be the quickest way home. The rest of the battalion managed to disengage at the cost of a few lightly wounded, but when they reached the edge of the plateau overlooking their base, they once again came under fire. They slid down the snow-covered slopes on their behinds and eventually worked their way home.

When the roll call was taken, it was discovered that Sandirescu and his party had still not returned. The razvedchiki, who were still comparatively fresh, set off in their BMPs to find them. They returned at five o’clock in the evening, with the body of one of the cooks. They had picked up six more soldiers stumbling back to base. Sandirescu was one of them, but he was too shocked to say what had happened. Two others turned up during the night: a cook who had lost his boots and whose feet were cut to pieces; and one of the drivers, nicknamed the ‘Moldovan’, whose weapon had to be taken by force from his frozen hands. All he could say was that the rest were dead, except for one soldier, Pashanin, who had been taken prisoner.

Colonel Sidorov realised he was in trouble. He would be castigated for not waiting for better weather and a helicopter escort; the village was known to be well defended; his force was too small for the job; the cooks and drivers had been hopelessly unsuitable for battle. How was he to explain to his superiors that no one knew what had happened to the missing men? The exhausted soldiers were asked to volunteer to go out to find them. During the night—something unprecedented in army life—a grandfather and five new recruits stayed up to clean their weapons, get them dry clothing from the store, and dry their boots. The next day, swearing mightily, the volunteers set off into a cold clear dawn, a light snow falling, escorted this time by helicopters.

While half the soldiers climbed back on to the plateau to cover them, Ponomarev and his men were sent to the gorge along which Sandirescu had tried to withdraw. They found some landmines and some piles of spent cartridges. The river was frozen and they systematically broke the ice in case there was something beneath it. Almost at the end of their strength, they eventually found the frozen, mutilated, and emasculated remains of seven soldiers.

It was clear what had happened. Under fire, the wretched cooks had rushed as fast as they could towards their base, instead of taking up a defensive position and calling for help. The Moldovan and Pashanin, the two oldest soldiers in the group, had covered their retreat as best they could. The mujahedin had attacked the little detachment from both ends of the gorge. A third group had mowed them down from above. After running out of ammunition, the Moldovan had saved himself by jumping into the frozen river. Pashanin had refused to follow and was captured. The regiment later heard through their Afghan agents that he had been castrated and a ring put through his nose. He had been dragged naked through the villages and finished off a month later.

Six months later a scruffy small boy came to the base and offered to show them where Pashanin’s body was buried—for a price. The corpse was unrecognisable. The soldiers buried the body and for good measure slapped the small boy about a bit. In the absence of positive identification, Pashanin was recorded as missing in action.

Undismayed, Sidorov decided to mount another major operation. The direct route from Kishim to Faisabad—the Old Kishim Road—ran for about twenty miles. But it went over the Argu Pass, which was firmly controlled by the mujahedin. The only other available route was the New Kishim Road, which wound by a roundabout way for over sixty miles. The journey normally took three to four days, since the convoys, escorted by armoured vehicles, sappers, and the reconnaissance company, moved at a walking pace: quite literally, because the sappers had to go ahead on foot, looking for mines and roadside bombs. Even so, there were usually two or three explosions each time a convoy went out. If a column was fired upon, it would destroy the nearest village to deter further attacks. By the end of 1983 the New Kishim Road was lined with ruins.

Sidorov decided to reopen the Old Kishim Road and thus free for offensive operations the two battalions now immobilised by guard and escort duties. The whole regiment would take part in the operation, leaving only small garrisons to guard the regimental and battalion bases.

The operation took place at the end of May 1984. The evening before it began Sidorov gave another fiery speech to his men, calling on them to be worthy of their fathers and to fight to the last in the pursuit of victory. This time the temperature was forty degrees in the shade and several men fainted before he had finished.

The task force moved off the following morning in a cloud of black smoke, its engines roaring. At first things went well enough. But after the operation had been under way for several days it was decisively brought to an end by an avoidable accident.

Sidorov’s command vehicle got stuck in a river crossing. His driver was unable to get it going again. Sidorov hauled him out of the driver’s hatch, sent him on his way with a few well-placed blows, and slid into his place. As he did so, a grenade he was carrying snagged. The fuse ignited and in the few seconds remaining before the grenade went off Sidorov was unable to get rid of it. In the last second, he tried to shield the other men in the vehicle from the blast. He himself was killed.

The operation was immediately called off. That evening all the officers of the regiment got drunk. They fired off their guns and signal flares, and for good measure four tanks let off a salvo at the nearest kishlak so that the locals too should also have something to remember Sidorov by. The soldiers got no vodka, but they were given extra helpings of meat and fried potatoes. The new recruits were detailed off to mount the guard for the night.

The mutilated body was put back together in the regimental morgue and dressed in Sidorov’s parade uniform. The next day the regiment paraded to honour his coffin. The guard of honour was mounted by the regimental officers, all with hangovers. The regimental band played as the coffin, loaded with Sidorov’s medals, was carried to the helicopter to begin the long journey back to a grave in Moscow’s Kuzminskoe Cemetery.⁴⁰

The Sledgehammer

Most of the 40th Army’s large-scale operations took place in the imposing mountains on the border with Pakistan, across which lay the mujahedin’s main supply routes, or in the fertile Pandsher Valley, from which bands could threaten the Russians’ own supply lines across the Salang Pass.

The city of Khost is only ten miles from the eastern border with Pakistan, about ninety miles south of Kabul and sixty miles from Gardez, to which it is linked by a strategic road, open to ambush and rising to ten thousand feet where it crosses the Satykandav Pass. During the Soviet war the guerrilla force in these parts was led by Jalaluddin Haqqani (c. 1950–). Twenty years later the same force was led by his son, Sirajuddin. By then the Russian base in Khost was being used by the Americans: it was here that seven CIA employees were killed by a suicide bomber in December 2009.

Jalaluddin’s base at Zhawar consisted of a complex of tunnels whose entrances faced towards Pakistan, only a couple of miles away. Inside were arms depots and repair shops, a garage, a medical station, a radio centre, a kitchen, a mosque, and a hotel. Five hundred mujahedin defended the base, armed with a howitzer, rocket launchers, heavy antiaircraft machine guns, and two T-55 tanks they had captured from the Afghan army in 1983. From this base Jalaluddin was able to keep Khost under constant threat.⁴¹

In late 1985 the Afghan army, supported by Soviet units, launched a major operation to smash the Zhawar base.⁴² The initial attacks were unsuccessful. An airborne assault by the Afghan 38th Commando Brigade got lost in the darkness and landed on the wrong side of the frontier. They were surrounded and taken prisoner. By now the government troops had lost some two-thirds of their strength through death, wounds, and desertion, and were no longer effective.

Varennikov flew to Khost to sort things out. This time the Soviets provided three battalions from the 56th Guards Independent Airborne Assault Brigade and two from the 345th Guards Independent Parachute Assault Regiment to support the Afghans. The Afghans succeeded in capturing Zhawar—only to find that it had been abandoned. Soviet engineers were given a little time—too little—to destroy the tunnels. The troops were then withdrawn. A victory parade was held back in Kabul. The mujahedin reoccupied the Zhawar complex in a matter of days. For good measure, they executed seventy-eight captured Afghan army officers, including the commander of the 38th Commando Brigade.

The following autumn it had to be done all over again. The operation was code-named Magistral (Highway), and the commanders were General Gromov and the Afghan Minister of Defence, Colonel General Tanai, he who had helped evacuate the advisers from Herat in March 1979. About ten thousand Soviet and eight thousand Afghan troops were involved. Because of its size and political significance, Magistral would be one of the most substantial operations of the whole war.⁴³ Once again the blockade was raised and on 30 December the first supply columns started to reach Khost. Once again the Soviet forces withdrew and the mujahedin returned. Varennikov was made a Hero of the Soviet Union. Those who believed that it was others who had done the actual fighting were not best pleased.⁴⁴

One of the most famous incidents of the whole war occurred in the aftermath of Operation Magistral. This was the defence of Hill 3234 by the 9th Company of the 345th Guards Independent Parachute Assault Regiment—the same company which Vostrotin had led in the storming of the Taj Bek Palace in December 1979. The hill—over ten thousand feet above sea level—commanded a significant sector of the road to Gardez, which the Soviet commanders were determined to keep open. The 9th Company, thirty-nine men in all, were landed on the hilltop on 7 January 1988, and were attacked almost immediately by a mujahedin force estimated at between two hundred and four hundred men. The attacks continued until the following morning, by which time the defenders were almost out of ammunition and had lost six dead and twenty-eight wounded. Two of the dead, a sergeant and a corporal, were made Heroes of the Soviet Union. In 2005 a big-budget film, 9th Company, was made about the incident. It had considerable commercial success in Russia and abroad, but most Afghan veterans thought it bombastic and historically inaccurate, not at all like the war that they had experienced.

Jalaluddin resumed the blockade around Khost. Charlie Wilson, the US Congressman who was one of the most effective supporters of the mujahedin, visited Jalaluddin and pronounced him ‘goodness personified’.⁴⁵ He finally captured Khost in April 1991, two years after the Soviets had left Afghanistan. He later joined the Taliban and remained with them after 9/11. Charlie Wilson’s hero became number three on the Americans’ ‘wanted’ list.⁴⁶

The Pandsher

It was the operations of the 40th Army in the Pandsher Valley that caught the imagination of Russians and foreigners alike. There were nine major operations in the valley, according to most calculations, though there are arguments about definition. The pattern of all these operations was similar. The 40th Army swept into the valley and took the ground, but was unable to inflict a decisive defeat on Masud because of his evasive tactics. The Russians would then pull out, leaving Afghan military units and civilian representatives of the Kabul regime to hold the territory. This they regularly failed to do: Masud reoccupied the valley, killed, seduced, or expelled the regime’s representatives, and the whole thing had to be done all over again. Even so the Russians always maintained a toehold in the valley. In addition to its fort in Anava, the second battalion of the 345th Guards Independent Parachute Assault Regiment had twenty zastavas spread through the lower reaches, each manned by up to a dozen men under a lieutenant. They were usually supplied by helicopters, a dangerous business: though Masud’s men did not have Stingers, they used their heavy machine guns to good effect, and nearly a third of the local helicopter squadron was lost. There was a regular trickle of casualties: soldiers stepped on mines or were hit by snipers. If there were no helicopters available, a small armoured group would be put together to evacuate the wounded by road to Bagram, putting other soldiers at risk.

The Pandsher Valley is a place of spectacular beauty. Its people are Tajiks, devout but not fanatical Sunni Muslims, often at odds with the Pushtuns to the south. Alexander the Great went this way in an epic winter march in pursuit of Bessus, the last claimant to the imperial Persian throne. Later the locals made a living by extracting tribute from the rich caravans from China which passed through the valley, until the twentieth century one of the main trade routes northwards from Kabul. The painters of the European Renaissance used lapis lazuli mined around the upper valley for making the blue paint for the robes of their Madonnas. The mines generated an income of more than $5 million a year even during the war; they were carefully camouflaged, heavily protected against air attack, and exploited with the help of Japanese and West German engineers. Because of their economic importance to the resistance, the mines were attacked—unsuccessfully—in June 1981 by long-range bombers from bases in the Soviet Union.⁴⁷

After the road over the Salang Pass was built, the valley lost its significance as a trade route. But despite its diminished importance, its position—dangerously close to Bagram, the main Soviet airbase, to the main Soviet supply line across the Hindu Kush through the Salang Tunnel, and to Kabul itself—meant that guerrilla forces operating out of the valley were a thorn in the Russians’ side from the first day of the Soviet occupation to the last (see Map 4).

The entrance to the valley from the Shomali Plain, about fifty-five miles north of Kabul, is forbidding. From the town of Charikar you pass through a narrow gorge, the Dalang Sang. The Pandsher River foams along, up to sixty feet below you, and the road clings to the sheer rock face on your left. It was along this narrow road that the Russians had to funnel their soldiers, their guns, and their armour as they stormed the valley time and again in the first five years of the war.

Once you are through the gorge, the valley opens out. In its lower reaches there are vineyards, orchards of mulberries and apricots, and irrigated fields of wheat and maize. The river itself is rich with fish. Kishlaks are spread out along the river and up the sides of the hills, many with no more than a single street with shops or a market. They are often guarded by a small fort, and the houses themselves are walled and capable of defence.

From Charikar to the upper end of the valley is more than a hundred miles.⁴⁸ During the Russian time the road petered out after fifty-three miles. After that you had to proceed on foot or on horseback, over increasingly rugged country, until you were up among the glaciers of the Hindu Kush, between ten and twenty thousand feet high and very close to the border with Pakistan and China.⁴⁹ Two passes lead out of these high mountains and mark the end of the valley: the Khawak Pass (12,624 feet) to the northern plains and the Anjoman Pass (14,534 feet) to Badakhshan, the most north-easterly province of Afghanistan. Passable with difficulty in summer, in the winter they are closed for most purposes. It was over these passes that determined men brought goods, arms, and ammunition to feed the rebellion.

The first Soviet operation in the Pandsher Valley took place in April 1980, only four months after the invasion. Three Soviet battalions participated, including the 4th Battalion of the 56th Guards Independent Airborne Assault Brigade under the command of Captain Leonid Khabarov. About a thousand Afghan soldiers and security police went with them. The plan was that the Soviet troops would block the kishlaks as they advanced and the Afghans would search them. To oppose this force Masud had little more than a thousand men. They were armed mainly with old-fashioned rifles and they had not yet constructed much in the way of defensive works. They mined the only road in the valley, destroyed the bridges, and planned to ambush the invaders.

At first the operation went smoothly. The Russians cleared the mines, rebuilt the bridges, and advanced with reasonable speed. Where the ruined road made it impossible to move forward, they drove along the bed of the river. They quickly reached Masud’s headquarters at the kishlak of Pasishah-Mardan. It had been abandoned in a hurry: the prison was empty and files of documents, lists and identity documents lay scattered all around.

Sergei Morozov, a sergeant in the 56th Guards Independent Airborne Assault Brigade, said, ‘This was the first operation where we met major resistance. There were ambushes, the roads were blown up. Of course I did not know exactly what was going on because I was only a sergeant. We drove as far as we could and then dismounted. After leaving the kishlak which had housed Masud’s headquarters, we marched right to the end of the Pandsher Valley. It was the furthest anyone got during the whole war, and very close to the Pakistan frontier.

‘On the way back along the mountain path, my battalion was ambushed. Thirteen men were killed in the leading platoon. My own platoon had been in the lead on the way out and so we were in the rearguard on the way back. We stopped for the night and had to beat off a number of mujahedin attacks. Their weapons in those days were simple, many of them home-made. They didn’t get mortars until later. The numbers opposing us were very small—perhaps only a few dozen. We had helicopter cover throughout, though not of course at night. During the long march most of the radios failed because the batteries ran out. But I was familiar with radios from before the war and I had turned off my radio when it was out of range or blocked by the mountains. So I had enough power to call in helicopter support when it became necessary… It took us some time to get away from the inflexible tactics we had learned for war in Europe. Although our brigade had been formed for operations in the desert and the mountains, there was a difference between theory and practice. After the first Pandsher operation, I asked my company commander, Captain Khabarov, whether it made sense to advance in clumsy columns, which could get stuck, and often could not turn round. Would it not be better to leapfrog troops forward with helicopters? And of course we did in time learn to do those things.’⁵⁰

The Russians called it a victory. But the rebels considered that the victory was theirs. An Afghan historian has claimed that there were only two hundred armed rebels in the valley at the time, and their only anti-tank weapons were three rocket launchers. They deliberately offered no resistance to the initial Russian advance, but fell on the Russians as they withdrew down the mountains. The rebel newspaper The Call of the Jihad claimed that a hundred Soviet and Afghan soldiers were killed, ten guns were captured, and eight tanks and other vehicles damaged. The rebels lost four dead. Twenty-five civilians were also killed.⁵¹

Naturally enough, Masud used the ceasefire of 1983–4 to enlarge and re-equip his forces. Soviet intelligence calculated that by then he had three thousand five hundred men. Five hundred were defending the entrance to the valley. Another two thousand were operating against the Afghan and Soviet garrisons. The remainder were in the north-east part of the valley, and their task was to ward off airborne landings.⁵²

Under pressure from the Afghan leadership, Moscow decided in the spring of 1984 to deal with Masud once and for all. This time they would use a total of 11,000 Soviet and 2,600 Afghan troops, together with 200 aircraft and 190 helicopters.

Special forces troops went in first. They discovered that the rebel positions were empty. The Russians decided not to call off the operation, since the bombers, carrying cluster as well as high explosive bombs, the largest weighing nine tons, had already taken off from their bases inside the Soviet Union.⁵³ The air strike lasted about two hours.

The main force moved in at four o’clock on 19 April, preceded by sappers. On 30 April the second battalion of the 682nd Motor-rifle Regiment was particularly badly hit, thanks to the carelessness of the regimental commander, who had ordered it to advance into a ravine leading off the valley without first securing the commanding heights. At first the battalion met no resistance. They lowered their guard and were promptly ambushed from three sides. In the resulting fight, the battalion lost fifty-three dead, including twelve officers, and fifty-eight wounded. Private Nikolai Knyazev described the aftermath.

‘My platoon was guarding the regimental command post when we heard a sudden commotion, and the regimental commander told us that one of our battalions had been attacked, and that there were wounded and dead.

‘We loaded stretchers on to our armoured vehicles and started up the ravine. After waiting for darkness, we continued on foot. There were about ten of us together with the platoon commander. It was not easy to make our way along the mountain paths and it took us a long time, since there were boulders and terraces everywhere, which made it difficult to work out the distance we had covered. We seemed to be marching for eternity.

‘After a while we saw a strange light shining in the darkness and the platoon commander ordered us to lie down; but we soon worked out that it was light shining through the periscopes of a BMP. We had barely moved any distance further when we were fired on by a Kalashnikov. Our platoon commander, Lieutenant Arutiunov, fired a rocket, we shouted out, and the firing stopped. We came up close. It was one of our own BMPs, which had been blown up by a mine. The driver and the deputy political officer of the battalion, Major Kononenko, had remained with the vehicle, both suffering from concussion. We moved forward. After a little while we met the razvedchiki who had been sent ahead of us. They were carrying some dead bodies, including the body of the battalion commander, Captain Korolev. Everybody sobered up in a moment.

‘It was already getting light… as we arrived at a kishlak. As we went down the main street, we heard the sound of motors. Two of the battalion’s BMPs were moving towards us. They were loaded down with the bodies of dead soldiers. Arms and legs stuck out of the pile in different directions. Smashed-up radios and rocket launchers were piled up as well. A group of soldiers who had survived the battle were walking behind the armoured vehicles. It was terrible to look at their faces. They were finished, they expressed no emotion, they were like zombies.

‘We brought the survivors back to the main body of the regiment. A helicopter landed nearby and some generals emerged. One of them ordered the surviving soldiers to form up. They had not yet pulled themselves together and still smelled of corpses—they had been lying among the dead for days (I can’t even imagine what had gone on in their heads). One of the visitors came up to them and shouted, ‘Bastards! Wankers! You’re standing here, you bastards, and your comrades are lying out there! Why are you here?!’—that’s how he addressed them. Then he read them the riot act and left with the feeling that he had done his duty. The lads stood silent and unfeeling—perhaps they did not even hear him.

‘That evening we were ordered to return to the scene of the action and bring back the remaining bodies. Imagine an open area about a hundred metres square. The river runs through the middle. On the right-hand side there is a level place, a few terraces and a hill about two or three hundred metres high. To the left of the river there is a path, an overhanging wall of rock on one side and on the other a sheer drop into the river.

‘It was immediately clear that we were in the right place. There was a heavy smell of corpses—the boys had been lying there for nearly two days, and at that time of year it is already getting hot. We were very much afraid that the rebels were waiting for someone to come to collect the bodies and that we too would end up lying there. We made our way to the foot of the hill, to the terraces. First we came across the body of a sergeant who was due to be demobilised: he had lost his legs either from an explosion or a burst of heavy machine-gun fire. Five or six of the lads were lying piled up in a natural cave on the terrace. They had been cut down either by a machine-gun burst or when the rebels had started to throw hand grenades. So there they lay together where death had caught up with them. We took the bodies across the river mechanically, as if we were asleep. The sight of the bodies was terrible.

‘There were rags of something hanging on a tree and below it a mess. Evidently a bullet had hit a mine that one of the soldiers had been carrying.

‘Suddenly we heard a weak groan some distance off from the hollow, by the rocks. We carefully went towards the noise and came across a soldier who was still alive. His shin had been shot off and was hanging by rags of tendon. He was weakened by loss of blood, but he had managed to put a tourniquet round his leg and stem the flow. We gave him first aid and took him to the vehicles. He survived. There were no weapons left—they had all been collected by the rebels.

‘On the morning of 2 May we returned to the regimental armoured group. The bodies were lying on a stony beach in rows. There were about fifty of them. We were told that some had already been taken away. Our company commander, Lieutenant Kurdiuk, was lying on his back with his elbows bent and his fists clenched, and across his chest you could see a line of bullet holes. It was said that he had been shot by the Afghan soldiers who were marching with the battalion when they started to desert to the rebels, but he had time to order the lads to fire on them.’⁵⁴

This operation too was described by the Soviets as a victory. After it was over, Marshal Sokolov flew to Rukha, the chief town in the valley, to see things for himself. There was nothing to see. Soviet tanks were standing around in the wheat fields. But there was little damage and no sign of the locals. Sokolov called a meeting in the house which was being used by the staff. There were three Afghans there—the orgyadro, or organisational cell which was to restore the authority of the Kabul government to the valley. The three men sat despondent and unnoticed among the gathering of generals and colonels.

The generals reported to Sokolov that three thousand rebels had opposed the incursion. Seventeen hundred had been killed, and the survivors had retreated into the mountains, carrying the bodies of their dead comrades with them. That was why there was so little to be seen.

Leonid Shebarshin, the Deputy Chief of the Analytical Department of the KGB’s Foreign Intelligence Headquarters in Moscow, was also present. He was not impressed by the figures being bandied around. How many casualties had there been on the Soviet side? How could thirteen hundred rebel survivors have carried seventeen hundred corpses? How could the corpses have been counted, since they were nowhere to be seen? He discovered the answer. Enemy casualties were estimated according to a formula based on the amount of ammunition expended. This charmingly precise formula had enabled the Soviets to claim that the rebels had lost thirty thousand men every year since 1982.⁵⁵

Sokolov reported to Ustinov that 2,800 rebels had been killed and thirty captured. He told Karmal that the way had now been cleared for the Afghan authorities to set up a civilian administration and launch programmes of social and economic reform for the benefit of the peasantry in the valley.⁵⁶ Only later did it become clear that Masud, forewarned by his agents in Kabul, had again withdrawn most of his forces to safety before the attack. That was why the Soviet troops had met with so little serious opposition. Their losses came chiefly from mines and ambushes as they were combing through villages. The long-range bombers had had little effect on a dispersed enemy and a rural countryside: as the wretched infantrymen said, ‘They didn’t earn their chocolate.’⁵⁷ Masud’s prestige among his own people increased still further. He was able to extend his control in the northern provinces of the country and grew from being an ordinary field commander to being a major political figure, well known inside and outside Afghanistan.

Tactics without Strategy

Sergeant Morozov’s commander, Captain Khabarov, never got over his bitterness at the way these operations were conducted. ‘Why,’ he asked, ‘did we leave the Pandsher so quickly? What was the point of the operation?… Throughout the whole of that war practically every operation ended in the same way. Military operations began, soldiers and officers died, Afghan soldiers died, the mujahedin and the peaceful population died, and when the operation was over our forces would leave, and everything would return to what it had been before. I still feel guilty and bitter about the Afghan government forces… whom we betrayed and sold down the river when we left Afghanistan, leaving them and their families to the mercy of the victors.’⁵⁸

The sledgehammer blows were incapable of cracking the nut of an elusive, uncoordinated guerrilla enemy. These operations usually succeeded in their immediate objectives. The garrison would be relieved, the base would be destroyed, the valley occupied. But the Russians never had sufficient troops to hold the ground they took. After a successful operation they would withdraw to their bases and hand responsibility to their Afghan allies. But the government’s military and civilian representatives found it impossible to operate amid a hostile population. Too often, under moral and military pressure from the mujahedin, they abandoned their posts, deserted, or went over to the enemy.

And so the Russians discovered, as other armies have discovered in Afghanistan before and since, that once you have taken the ground you need troops to hold it. They might dominate the towns and the villages by day. But the mujahedin would rule them by night. They never broke the rebels’ grip on the countryside or closed the frontier through which the rebels received their supplies.

In the end the Russians had good tactics but no workable strategy. They could win their fights, but they could not convincingly win the war. Their best efforts, military and political, went for nothing. They eventually had no choice but to disentangle themselves as best they could.

Armies are institutions for organising and channelling violence in the pursuit of some concept of the national interest. They help to focus the emotions of patriotism, self-sacrifice, and solidarity which states need for their coherence and sometimes for their survival.

Violence is not easy to control, and armies have to cope with violence within their own ranks as well as atrocities against the enemy and the civilian population. Otherwise they risk a breakdown of discipline and a loss of function. Wellington was notoriously severe in his determination to keep his army—‘the scum of the earth enlisted for drink’—under control. Even he did not always succeed.

But commanders also have to preserve the morale of their men and the principle—itself important for effective cohesion—of the ‘honour of the uniform’. Time and again, and in all armies, this leads to evasion and cover-up to prevent the stories of military crimes emerging or to limit their consequences: because of the pressure of military and public opinion the US authorities found it impossible to bring to account all those responsible for the massacre at My Lai in Vietnam in 1968. Commanders in the 40th Army were no different. They were blamed by their generals for not exercising a more effective discipline. Fearing for their careers, they often responded by writing off suicides and murders as battle casualties. Some crimes could not be concealed. But there were plenty of other cases where officers managed to avoid formal inquiry into the actions of themselves or their men. And things such as the destruction of villages suspected of harbouring insurgents or firing on the troops were regarded as a legitimate, or at least an unavoidable, act of war.

The 40th Army made it clear enough to its soldiers what would happen if they misbehaved. In 1985 they produced a little booklet ‘The Life, Habits and Customs of the Peoples of Afghanistan: Rules and Norms of Behaviour for Military Personnel Serving outside their Own Country’.¹ This described the country and its people, their religion, their fierce sense of independence, their housing, clothing and food, their customs of mutual hospitality and vendetta, the rituals surrounding birth, marriage, and death. It continued with some simple rules of behaviour: remember that you are a representative of the army and be worthy of your historical mission; know and respect the customs of the local people, even if they do not correspond with your own; be very careful to respect Afghan women; do not interfere with a Muslim at prayer and do not go into a mosque without a very good reason; beware of enemy spies; do not drink water from irrigation canals; do not leave camp or accept hospitality without permission. There were strict injunctions against trading, especially in narcotics. The booklet concluded: ‘Soldier, remember!… you are criminally responsible for military crimes under the Criminal Code, whether committed negligently, carelessly, or deliberately.’ Deliberate killing could be punished by up to ten years; the death penalty could be imposed if there were aggravating circumstances, which included being drunk. Robbery with violence and smuggling into the Soviet Union could both be punished by up to ten years in prison.

Military Crime

These were not idle threats. The Soviet military prosecutors in Afghanistan had to deal with the whole range of military crimes: murder, looting, rape, drug addiction, desertion, self-mutilation, theft, and random violence against the population. Those they found guilty were given harsh sentences of imprisonment, sent to disciplinary battalions back in the Soviet Union, and occasionally shot. At one time the notorious prison in Pul-i Charkhi outside Kabul held two hundred Russian soldiers accused of a variety of offences against the Afghan population, including murder. By the end of the war over two thousand five hundred Soviet soldiers were serving prison sentences, more than two hundred for crimes of premeditated murder.²

Until the files of the Military Prosecutor’s office are opened it is not possible to arrive at any reliable overall figures. Those that are available are very patchy. A senior general speaking to the commanders of the 40th Army in 1988 claimed that in 1987 the number of crimes went down to 543 compared with 745 the previous year. He named several units whose record was particularly poor: reconnaissance units, which were notoriously free and easy about discipline, the air force, the 108th and 201st Motor-rifle Divisions, the 66th and 70th Independent Motor-rifle Brigades, the 860th Independent Motor-rifle Regiment. Altogether, according to another source, 6,412 criminal charges were preferred against soldiers in Afghanistan, including 714 cases of murder, 2,840 cases of weapons sales to Afghans, and 534 drug-trafficking offences.³

Despite the sanctions, soldiers committed many brutal acts individually or in groups. The excuse often was, ‘They did it to us, so we have a right to do it to them.’ Soviet commanders made a point of telling their men the stories of Russian prisoners being executed or tortured by the mujahedin, the mutilated bodies left for their comrades to find. The stories were not untrue: they belonged, after all, to an old tradition in Afghanistan, to which Kipling bore witness. One minor mujahedin leader boasted that he had made a practice of half-skinning Russian prisoners after a successful ambush, and leaving them alive, surrounded by booby traps, to catch the Soviet rescue teams.⁴ Varennikov described what happened when a raid by a company of the 22nd Special Forces Brigade ended in disaster in April 1985 in the eastern mountains of the Kunar province, scene of some of the Americans’ most vicious fighting twenty years later. The company had not expected opposition. They were ambushed and thirty-one were killed. In recovering their bodies, the Soviet forces lost three more men. It was clear that seven of the soldiers had killed themselves rather than surrender. The others had been mutilated or burned alive. Varennikov went to see the survivor, a sergeant who had lost his mind.⁵

The soldiers committed their crimes sometimes in cold blood, more often in the heat or aftermath of battle. ‘The thirst for blood… is a terrible desire,’ wrote one of them. ‘It is so strong that you cannot resist it. I saw for myself how the battalion opened a hail of fire on a group that was descending towards our column. And they were OUR soldiers, a detachment from the reconnaissance company who had been guarding us on the flank. They were only two hundred metres away and we were 90 per cent sure they were our people. And nevertheless—the thirst for blood, the desire to kill at all costs. Dozens of times I saw with my own eyes how the new recruits would shout and cry with joy after killing their first Afghan, pointing in the direction of the dead man, clapping one another on the back, and firing off a whole magazine into the corpse “just to make sure”… Not everyone can master this feeling, this instinct, and stifle the monster in his soul.’

Vanya Kosogovski, a soldier from Odessa in the 860th Independent Motor-rifle Regiment, was a cheerful fellow, liked by everyone. His company was sent out by helicopter to follow up an intelligence report about a village some fifteen miles away from the regimental base. On the way the gunners amused themselves by machine-gunning a herd of oxen and sheep: their excuse was that they were denying the mujahedin their supplies. After shooting up the village itself, the soldiers landed to comb through it. In one house Kosogovski noticed a small door and heard people breathing behind it. Above the door was a small aperture. He took a grenade, pulled out the pin, shoved it through the hole, and followed the explosion with a burst from his gun. When he kicked down the door, he saw the results of his handiwork. An old woman lay dead, a younger woman was still breathing, seven children aged between one and five lay beside them, some still moving. Kosogovski emptied his magazine into the heaving mass and followed it up with another grenade.

‘I don’t know why I did it,’ he said later. ‘I was beside myself. Perhaps I didn’t want them to suffer. Anyway, I would have had the military police on my back.’ And indeed, he might well have ended up in a disciplinary battalion, had his officers not covered up the affair.⁶

On 14 February 1981 a reconnaissance patrol of eleven soldiers from the 66th Independent Motor-rifle Brigade led by a senior lieutenant broke into a house in a village near Jalalabad. There they found two old men, three young women, and five or six children. They raped and shot the women and then shot the rest, except for one small boy, who hid himself and survived to be a witness. General Maiorov, the Chief Soviet Military Adviser in Kabul from June 1980 to November 1981, immediately ordered an investigation. The perpetrators confessed and were arrested. Fearing that the mujahedin leadership would use the incident as an excuse to launch a countrywide jihad, Maiorov strengthened the security regime in the major cities. And he apologised for the incident to the Afghan Prime Minister, Ali Sultan Keshtmand.

He immediately came under pressure to change the story from the Soviet Ambassador, from the KGB representative in Kabul, and from the Ministry of Defence and the KGB in Moscow. The KGB claimed to have information that the atrocity had been carried out as a deliberate provocation by mujahedin dressed in Soviet uniforms. Why, demanded Ogarkov, the Chief of Staff, was Maiorov trying to blacken the good name of the Soviet army? Ustinov, the Minister of Defence, hinted that if Maiorov did not change his tune he would not be re-elected to the Central Committee at the forthcoming meeting of the XXVIth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Maiorov held out. He was not re-elected to the Central Committee. But Karmal complained directly to Brezhnev, who gave orders for condign punishment. The perpetrators of the crime were sentenced to death or to long terms of imprisonment. The brigade commander, Colonel Valeri Smirnov, was severely reprimanded. The brigade itself was on the verge of being disbanded, saved only by its glorious record in the Second World War.⁷

Even senior officers could be punished for allowing their troops to commit excesses. After the fifth Pandsher operation in May–June 1982, the commander of the 191st Independent Motor-rifle Regiment, Lieutenant Colonel Kravchenko, was court-martialled and sentenced to ten years for shooting prisoners. The commander of the 860th Independent Motor-rifle Regiment, Colonel Alexander Shebeda, was dismissed in April 1986 after he had been in the job only six months. Twenty prisoners had been captured on a raid and brought back to the base at Faisabad. Shebeda put them into the overnight custody of the reconnaissance company. The company had recently suffered losses and was still smarting. The men killed the prisoners and threw the bodies into the River Kochka. There was a scandal and Shebeda was relieved of his command.⁸

Collateral Damage

These were individual crimes, which the 40th Army could try to prevent or punish more or less effectively. Others were inherent in the nature of the war against a determined but elusive enemy who could merge almost at will with the civilian population. For the soldiers, this war without fronts was particularly terrifying and confusing. You could be blown up by a mine at any moment. The bearded peasant cultivating his field could next minute be firing at you from ambush or laying a bomb; or you might be shot in the back by a woman or even a child. And so the soldiers learned to shoot first regardless of the consequences. They reacted or overreacted savagely, either to defend themselves or to revenge their losses, calling in an air strike or a bombardment by artillery or tanks against villages they suspected of harbouring mujahedin or of firing on their troops, and leaving them in a pile of smoking rubble.

Alexander Rutskoi, an air-force colonel and Hero of the Soviet Union, told the Russian parliament after the war was over, ‘A kishlak fires at us and kills someone. I send up a couple of planes and there is nothing left of the kishlak. After I’ve burned a couple of kishlaks they stop shooting.’⁹ Vitali Krivenko tells how his company of the 12th Guards Motor-rifle Regiment was manning a roadblock outside Herat. There were two kishlaks nearby. One was deserted, but there were thought to be mujahedin lurking there. The population of the other was friendly. Helicopters were brought in, but they attacked the wrong village. By the time the mistake had been sorted out, the friendly village had been destroyed. ‘So what?’ Krivenko commented. ‘How many other villages got wiped out, for good reason or simply for fun?’¹⁰

Even when soldiers and their commanders had the best intentions, things could go wrong. It is a fundamental weakness of any counter-insurgency campaign that, too often, there comes a moment when a commander’s duty to preserve the lives of his soldiers overrides any wish he may have to spare the lives of civilians. Valeri Shiryaev was involved in just such a case. He was travelling with a convoy of tankers and supply lorries which was half a mile long and moved very slowly. It was preceded by sappers and a few BMPs. The rearguard consisted of more BMPs and four tanks. The convoy came under fire as it was passing through a village. Several tankers were hit and had to be pushed off the road. By the time the shooting had lasted for thirty minutes, four soldiers had been killed and others wounded. In the end the commander of the column ordered the tanks to open fire on the village, even though he knew there must be women and children in it. Each tank fired five salvoes and the village was destroyed. The commander was later reprimanded for not having ordered his tanks to fire sooner.¹¹

The result was devastation. ‘The aircraft flew over the “green zone”,’ wrote Alexander Prokhanov in one of his short stories, ‘dropped bombs, flattened the gardens and the walls around them, reached down to destroy the roots of the plants, diverted and blocked up the underground arteries of the irrigation system, smashed the kishlaks to dust, burned up the very oxygen with the heat of their explosions, and turned the valley into a lunar landscape, grey, friable, where the insects, the seeds, the bacteria, the pollen of the flowers were dying in agony. Sterile and dry, like an overheated crucible, the plain lay bathed in sunshine.’¹²

Several attempts were made by outside observers to chronicle the abuses of human rights committed by all sides in the fighting between 1978 and 2001. In 1984 the United Nations appointed Felix Ermacora, an Austrian human rights lawyer, to investigate, and his reports came out regularly over the next ten years.¹³ The Afghanistan Justice Project (AJP) issued another report covering the period 1978–2001, from the Communist coup in April 1978 until the first year of the US/NATO intervention.

The Afghan and Soviet governments initially refused to cooperate with Ermacora, though he was able to visit Afghanistan several times towards the end of the war and thereafter.¹⁴ His earlier reports were therefore largely based on interviews with refugees. Some four hundred thousand people had already fled to Pakistan before the Russians invaded. By the time Ermacora started his studies, the number had risen to 4 million. By the end of the war, he estimated, there were 5 million Afghan refugees in Iran and Pakistan out of a population of 19.5 million.¹⁵

These people provided many credible accounts of specific abuses by Soviet and government forces: arbitrary arrest, detention without trial, torture, execution, the killing of prisoners, individual and collective rape, the killing of women and children, the bombardment of villages, and the massacre of civilians. Not surprisingly, the witnesses were unable to give details of the units involved or their commanders. It was usually unclear whether the crimes were committed by Afghan or Soviet soldiers, though there is little doubt that Afghan soldiers were as brutal as the Russians in their treatment of Afghan civilians.¹⁶ The AJP report, which accepted that the Soviets had ended the mass slaughter which took place under Taraki and Amin, nevertheless concluded that they bore a general responsibility even for abuses committed by their allies because of their entrenched position in the Afghan government and military.¹⁷

The insurgents were also guilty of major abuses. The Pakistan-based groups threatened women who failed to conform to their strict ideas of Islamic propriety, assassinated opponents, and maintained prisons in Pakistan where they held, tortured, and in some cases executed Afghan refugees they suspected of opposing them.¹⁸ They systematically, and often indiscriminately, wiped out ‘collaborators’ and ‘spies’ inside Afghanistan, sometimes with their families, sometimes whole villages.¹⁹ In one incident in the Pandsher Valley, Masud’s men are said to have taken prisoner a thousand men from the 14th Afghan Brigade and shot the lot, so that the river ran red with blood.²⁰

The atrocities committed by the mujahedin were in part a reaction to the brutality of the invaders and the Afghan government forces; but they were also a reflection of traditional Afghan methods of warfare. In autumn 1989 Andrei Greshnov interviewed Mohamed Hamid, a highly intelligent rebel prisoner, in the Kabul interrogation prison. Greshnov asked him about the popular attitude to Soviet soldiers. ‘It varied. In general nobody was happy with the arrival of foreign forces, or with the government which they had put in place. I personally saw what the shuravi (Soviets) got up to in the provinces: they would wipe out whole villages in retaliation for one rifle shot. You yourself travel round the country and have seen for yourself how poorly people live there. People live comparatively well only in the cities. I thought a great deal about what was going on in my country and wrote to my brother, who was studying in the USSR. He and I have taken a different path in life. Part of the population of course supports the present regime. But those who do that are already infidels and they will have to pay for the blood of Muslims that they have shed.’

Greshnov asked whether Hamid had ever had to kill Soviet soldiers, or to take part in the torture of prisoners. He answered, ‘I had to fight, not with my tongue but with a machine gun. People who wanted to cut off heads went ahead and did it. People who didn’t want to didn’t do it. Incidentally, torture and the cutting off of heads are not some kind of special regime thought up especially for Soviet soldiers. Any infidel can end up without his head, including an Afghan. Everybody has his own view of the world. Some people cut off heads, others don’t. I prefer to sell my enemy for cash to people who are willing to buy, rather than to torture him. I saw that in the province of Logar. In the region of Sorkhab we destroyed a column and took several Soviet prisoners. They cut off the heads of the soldiers but they sold the officers. Prisoners were mostly sold to Germany, where they were bought by various human rights bodies who paid good money for them.’²¹

The mujahedin were willing to bargain with the Soviets as well. A Soviet officer of Tajik origin based in Shindand, Feliks Rakhmonov, was responsible for relations with the local population. He was liked both by the soldiers and by the Afghans, with whom he maintained contact. The locals would bring back soldiers who carelessly allowed themselves to be taken prisoner. On one occasion the Afghans brought Rakhmonov three soldiers in a donkey cart. The prisoners’ hands were tied with their own belts. Rakhmonov exchanged the prisoners for some flour and several canisters of diesel oil. After that—not surprisingly—the number of Soviet soldiers who were taken for profit began to rise.²²

The AJP report was highly critical of the Russians and the Afghan government. But it was equally clear about the abuses committed by the mujahedin. It gave names of commanders and their bands for the period of the Soviet war. It went on to document in considerable detail the crimes committed by all sides during the civil war, including the forces commanded by Masud and Hekmatyar—the bombardment by rockets and aircraft, the massacre and rape, which laid waste much of Kabul in 1993 and 1994 and resulted in an estimated twenty-five thousand dead between January and June 1994; the murderous regime of the Taliban which followed; and the atrocities on both sides which accompanied the American-backed campaign to expel the Taliban in 2001.²³ These equalled, if not exceeded, the horrors that occurred between 1979 and 1989.

It is not easy to get these stories into a proper perspective. Atrocity stories spread like wildfire in all wars. Some are true. Some are exaggerated in the telling. Some are invented for purposes of propaganda. The revolt of the Netherlands in the sixteenth century, the Thirty Years War in Germany, the French occupation in Spain during the Napoleonic Wars, the Indian Rising in 1857, were all rich in such stories. Even the comparatively clean fighting on the Western Front in the First World War produced the stories, or rather the myths, of the Belgian nuns raped and murdered by German soldiers and the Canadian sergeant crucified with bayonets.

Atrocities are especially prevalent, and especially horrific, in civil wars, and in wars of intervention by a technologically superior force against a determined national insurgency. The figures can never be reliably established, and the facts are too easily twisted for the purposes of controversy. Western propaganda successfully portrayed the 40th Army as particularly brutal in its conduct of the war in Afghanistan. Accusations that the Russians used chemical weapons were common at the beginning of the war. They seem to have used some kind of tear gas at some time: but reports of the systematic use of lethal gases were never verified and eventually faded. There were stories that both sides used booby traps and explosive devices disguised to look like everyday objects such as watches and pens. Much play was made with the story, which figured in a UN report of 1985 as well as in Western propaganda, that the KGB deliberately designed mines to look like children’s toys, in order to sow a particularly vicious kind of terror among ordinary Afghans. The Russians countered with stories that this was a tactic of the mujahedin and published photographs to back their claim. The story may have had its origin in the tiny ‘butterfly’ mines made of brightly coloured plastic, which were scattered from helicopters along rebel trails and supply routes. They were supposed to deactivate themselves after a given period, but often the deactivation mechanism did not work. But these devices were not the product of the twisted imagination of the KGB’s engineers. They were directly copied from the American Dragontooth BLU-43/B and BLU-44/B mines, used in very large numbers in Indo-China. They were intended to maim rather than to kill, since a wounded soldier is more trouble to his comrades than a dead one. The official name of the Soviet version was PFM-1, but the soldiers called them lepestki (petals). It is not surprising that children should have found them attractive, and that they and their parents should have reported them to journalists as disguised toys. But the experts in the Mine Action Coordination Centre of Afghanistan, whose job it was to know about these things, believed that the story ‘gained a life for obvious journalist reasons—but it has we think no basis in widespread fact’.²⁴

Disillusion

Whatever overall judgement one comes to about the nature of the war in Afghanistan, one thing is clear. As the war progressed and devastation spread throughout the country, the politicians and generals who had looked for a quick resolution to their problem, and the enthusiasts who had hoped to contribute something to the future of Afghanistan, all began to despair.

The war in Afghanistan was supposed to be secret, and for the first few years the Politburo took drastic measures to ensure that it remained so. Soldiers posted to Afghanistan were told to keep quiet about it. Soldiers returning to the Soviet Union were not allowed into Moscow at the time of the Olympic Games in 1980, for fear that they would talk to the foreign visitors.²⁵ The local Voenkomats sternly ordered the families of soldiers killed in Afghanistan not to tell anyone of the circumstances of their death.²⁶ In the first few years of the war, the government made it as hard as it could for ordinary people to discover what was going on.

The official line was that Soviet soldiers were performing their ‘international duty’ in Afghanistan, but that this involved no fighting. The television carried endless programmes showing Soviet and Afghan soldiers locked in warm embraces, Soviet doctors treating Afghan children, military propaganda units winning hearts and minds, Soviet women meeting the women of Afghanistan, soldiers handing out food and medicine, smiles everywhere.

This led to many absurdities. In 1980, according to the writer Vladimir Voinovich, the censor objected to a passage in a film about Sherlock Holmes in which Holmes deduces that Watson has returned disillusioned from the Second Anglo-Afghan War: instead he was said to have returned from a war ‘in some Eastern country’.²⁷

As late as 1985, the year Gorbachev came to power, strict rules were still being formulated about what journalists could and could not publish about the war. A list drawn up by the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Ministry, signed by Kryuchkov and Varennikov, said that the media could report the death or wounding of Soviet military personnel in the execution of their military duty, the repulse of rebels’ attacks, and the execution of tasks connected with giving international help to the Afghan people. There was to be no reporting of military actions by units larger than a company, nor about battlefield experience. There was to be no direct television reporting from the battlefield. Journalists could report the heroism of soldiers who had been made Heroes of the Soviet Union, but not the details of the units in which they served.²⁸ Similar rules were applied by the British army in Afghanistan two decades later: journalists embedded with the military could be forbidden from reporting the composition of forces, details of military movements, operational orders, casualties, place names, tactics, names or number of ships, unit or aircraft and names of individual servicemen. The difference was that the later war was also covered by journalists operating independently of the British military, who could report as they liked if they were prepared to take the considerable risks involved.

Of course, once the coffins started coming home, it became practically impossible to maintain the fiction, despite the best efforts of the Politburo. The decision which they took on 30 July 1981 is a measure of how far out of touch these old men were with political reality, and how little they understood the real limits of their authoritarian power. It had been proposed that each bereaved family should be given a thousand roubles for a headstone on the grave. But Mikhail Suslov, the Politburo’s ideologist, asked, ‘[Is it] politically desirable at this point to raise memorials and write the whole story on the headstones? After all in some cemeteries there will be several such graves.’ Andropov agreed that, though of course the soldiers must be buried with honour, it was a bit too early to put up headstones, and the others concurred. Suslov concluded, ‘We must work out what to say in answer to parents whose children have died in Afghanistan. There should be no improvisation. The answers should be laconic and standardised.’²⁹

For years there were indeed no proper memorials. The fallen were not greeted on their return with military honour and municipal ceremony as—one soldier, Andrei Blinushov, bitterly noted at the time—they would have been in America. Instead they were returned to their families by night, buried in hugger-mugger, in a miasma of threats of retribution if the shroud of secrecy was broken. Official edict was tempered by individual acts of humanity, as it often is in Russia. But few government decisions were so bitterly resented as this one.

The government’s attempts to impose secrecy were futile from the start and began to fray almost at once. In July 1980 Andrei Sakharov reinforced his early call for the withdrawal of Soviet troops in an interview with American television from his place of exile in the Volga city of Gorki (after the collapse of the Soviet Union once again called Nizhni Novgorod). He backed the interview with an open letter to the Soviet leadership. ‘I am addressing you on a matter of the highest importance,’ he began. ‘The war in Afghanistan has already been going on for seven months. Thousands of Soviet people have been killed and tens of thousands of Afghans—not only partisans, but above all peaceful citizens, old men, women, children, peasants, and townspeople. More than a million Afghans have become refugees. There are particularly ominous reports of the bombing of villages suspected of helping the partisans, of the mining of mountain roads which threatens whole regions with starvation.’

Ordinary people may not have been as well informed or as courageous as Sakharov, and in later years many of them claimed that they had not realised what was going on in Afghanistan until Gorbachev opened things up with glasnost after 1985. It was not as simple as that. People were inhibited by the official news blackout and by a kind of self-censorship which was very widespread at the time. It was hard to break away from the conventions and conformities of Soviet life, especially for those who had originally supported the war. Many of those who knew what was going on—diplomats, politicians, scholars, advisers—were appalled by what they knew, but kept their mouths shut. ‘I’m ashamed to say that, until I learned better, I too divided everything into black and white, friends and enemies, revolution and counter-revolution. Now I remember that bitterly. But perhaps I didn’t want to think? Perhaps I was afraid to ask myself the difficult questions? Wasn’t it just easier to live that way? My consciousness had become set in concrete, and it was a lengthy journey from being imprisoned by dogma to understanding,’ the journalist Vladimir Snegirev wrote later. ‘One can hardly demand civic courage from people who lived in the [Brezhnev] era of stagnation and mouthed the standard phrases expected from them. Let everyone look into himself and, if he can, let him remember where, when, how, on what occasions he hid behind a falsehood, failed to stand up for the truth, didn’t oppose injustice. No doubt all of us can draw up our own secret list.’³⁰

Nevertheless the news seeped through even this veil of self-censorship. Within little more than a month from the invasion, stories were circulating in Moscow that the hospitals in Tashkent were full of wounded soldiers, that aircraft were flying home with coffins, that mourning portraits were being displayed in several Moscow institutions that had sent their specialists to Afghanistan. Soldiers, journalists, nurses, and civilian officials were already returning; and they were gossiping despite the ban. Soldiers told their mothers, the mothers told their neighbours. The rumours spread like wildfire and were often exaggerated in the telling.³¹ Alexander Kartsev, the young intelligence officer who was then still a military cadet, heard at his sister’s wedding in January 1980 from a soldier who had taken part in the storming of Amin’s palace only a few weeks earlier. There was a relentless torrent of news about Afghanistan on foreign radio stations broadcasting to the Soviet Union. And once the zinc coffins started to turn up in small villages and towns throughout Russia, the cat was out of the bag. As one reader wrote to Komsomolskaya Pravda a couple of years into the war, ‘Don’t try to hush things up: a soldier writes home, and the whole village knows; a coffin comes home, and the whole region knows.’³²

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 unable to ignore as they struggled to find a way out of the mess they had got themselves into in Afghanistan.