Afgantsy

The system in the 40th Army for bringing in new recruits and demobilising the veterans was shot through with its own rituals and conducted with that mixture of inefficiency, brutality, and creative flexibility characteristic of the Soviet system as a whole.

As professionals, officers could usually count on getting home leave at least once during their time of service in Afghanistan. Leave was not always a satisfactory experience, even for those who could get it. Wives and other female relatives expected presents from the exotic markets of Afghanistan, which you could not always get through the customs. And the men would ask you how many people you had killed. The contrast between the reality of the fighting and the almost total inability of the civilians to understand what was really going on was sometimes too much to bear. Like British officers who came home from the trenches in France during the First World War, Soviet officers would sometimes cut short their leave in order to return to the raw but familiar simplicities of the fighting.¹

Demobilisation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Black Tulips

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

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

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

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

‘How many so far?’ the major asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Missing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Mothers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Rising in Badaber

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

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

During the war the fortress at Badaber was used for the storage of arms and ammunition, and as a training base for the fighters from Burhanuddin Rabbani’s Jamiat-i Islami. According to Rabbani, the base was entirely under his control: the Pakistan government did not attempt to interfere with what went on there. From 1983 Soviet and Afghan government prisoners were taken there to work in the ammunition stores and in the nearby quarries. They were kept in underground prison buildings—zindands. In 1985 there were about twelve Soviet prisoners there—most of whom had been captured by Masud’s men in the Pandsher Valley—and forty Afghan government soldiers and policemen. The men were worked very hard and the non-Muslims among them were given Muslim names as a preliminary to their conversion. It was by these names that their guards addressed them and by which they were expected to address one another.

At about six o’clock on the afternoon of Friday 26 April, so the story goes, most of the mujahedin guards were at prayer on the drill square. Only two were left to guard the prisoners. They were overpowered by a particularly powerful Ukrainian named Viktor Dukhovchenko (whose Muslim name was Yunos) and placed in the custody of one of the Afghan prisoners and a Soviet prisoner called Mohamed Islam. The other prisoners then broke into the armoury and seized the weapons. Their original plan was to make a break for freedom. But at this point the remaining guards were alerted by Mohamed Islam. They surrounded the compound and prevented the captives from escaping. The prisoners then barricaded themselves into the armoury, setting up heavy machine guns and mortars on the roof. Detachments of mujahedin and Pakistani army units including tanks and artillery were brought up, but their initial attempts to recapture the fortress were repelled.

Rabbani arrived at the base in the late evening to negotiate with the insurgents, promising them their lives if they surrendered. They demanded instead that they should be allowed to see the ambassadors of the Soviet Union and Afghanistan, and representatives of the Red Cross. They threatened to blow up the armoury if their demands were not met.

Rabbani rejected these demands. He narrowly missed being killed by a rocket fired by the insurgents and some of his bodyguards were seriously hurt. The following morning he ordered an all-out attack on the fort, supported by rocket artillery, tanks, and helicopters. The outcome was never in doubt, but it was determined when the armoury blew up and the prison was practically destroyed. Some say the building exploded when it was struck by an incoming shell; others that the insurgents blew it up themselves. Three of the insurgents survived, badly wounded. They were finished off with grenades. The explosion destroyed many of the attackers as well: some Russian accounts claim that 120 mujahedin were killed, along with up to ninety Pakistani regular soldiers and six American instructors.²⁵ The story later circulated that Soviet special forces were preparing to free the captives when the tragedy occurred.

The following day Gulbeddin Hekmatyar, the most extreme of the mujahedin leaders, issued an order to his men that in future no Russians were to be taken prisoner.

Neither the Soviet nor the Pakistani government had any interest in publicising these events. The Soviets were still maintaining that the ‘Limited Contingent of Soviet Forces in Afghanistan’ was not engaged in war; the presence of Soviet prisoners of war in far-distant Pakistan could not be reconciled with that bland line. The Pakistanis were equally maintaining the fiction that they were giving no assistance to the mujahedin: they sealed off the area of the prison and neither journalists nor foreigners were allowed near the place. An issue of the Peshawar newspaper Safir, which had carried a report of the incident, was destroyed.

Despite the official reticence, the news did seep out, but the details remained fragmentary and disputed. Some of the Afghan prisoners escaped in the confusion, eventually made their way home, and were able to provide the only direct accounts of what had happened. An American satellite is said to have transmitted a photograph on 28 April showing that the training camp had been destroyed by an explosion which had left a crater eighty yards across. The American radio station Voice of America reported on 4 May that twelve Soviet and twelve Afghan prisoners had been killed in the blast. The electronic intelligence branch of the 40th Army picked up exchanges between the Pakistani helicopters and their base. On 9 May an official of the International Red Cross informed the Soviet Embassy in Islamabad that there had been a rising in the camp. On 27 May the Soviet news agency Novosti reported, ‘Kabul. Popular meetings are continuing across the country in protest against the death in an uneven fight with the counter-revolutionaries and regular units of the Pakistan army of Soviet and Afghan soldiers kidnapped by the rebels on the territory of the DRA [Democratic Republic of Afghanistan] and secretly transferred to Pakistan. Peasants, workers, and representatives of the tribes are angrily condemning the barbaric action of Islamabad, which is crudely distorting the facts in a clumsy attempt to evade responsibility.’

The records of the prison camp were destroyed in the explosion, and so there was no reliable list of names of those prisoners who had died. Confusion was compounded because such lists as existed gave only the Muslim names of the prisoners, and their original names could only be reconstructed on the basis of fragmentary evidence. After the war was over the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), the GRU and the Veterans Committee of the Commonwealth of Independent States all made it their business to piece the story together. The first breakthrough did not come until December 1991, when a delegation led by Rabbani visited Moscow to persuade the new Russian government to cut off aid to the Communist government of President Najibullah. The mujahedin refused to negotiate on prisoners until they had received satisfaction on the main issue. They insisted that, in so far as there were any Soviet prisoners in their hands, they were guests and free to return home or go elsewhere as they pleased. But a Pakistani Deputy Foreign Minister with the delegation gave the names of five of the Soviet soldiers believed to have perished at Badaber.²⁶

Badaber was visited in 1992 by Zamir Kabulov from the Russian Embassy in Islamabad, who subsequently became Russian Ambassador in Kabul. The search was given a renewed impulse in 2003, thanks to the efforts of the Veterans Committee under General Aushev. Over the years seven names were established fairly securely: several were awarded posthumous medals for valour. Applications for awards on behalf of three others, Igor Vaskov, Nikolai Didkin, and Sergei Levchishin, were turned down by the Russian Ministry of Defence in 2002 because the evidence was insufficient.

One mother continued to hope that her son would return, long after all reasonable grounds for hope were gone. Alexander Zverkovich was an apprentice welder in Minsk in Belorussia when he was called up in 1983. In March 1984 his mother, Sofia, heard from his commander that he had gone ‘missing in action while carrying out his military duties’. Even before the Soviet Union collapsed, she went with other mothers of missing soldiers to Moscow to ask the authorities to help find their sons and bring home those who had survived as prisoners of war; but without result. In the mid-1990s she appealed to the courts to rule that her son was dead, so that she could receive the benefits to which she was entitled. But in 2006 her hopes were revived when she learned that her son had participated in the rising in Badaber. ‘They say a monument has been put up in Moscow to those who took part in the rising,’ she told her local newspaper. ‘The radio said that some of them survived. Some people in the village even said that they had seen Sashenka [Alexander] on the television… I’ve even been to fortunetellers. Some say he died; others maintain that he is alive and living beyond the ocean. I’d give anything to know the truth, however bitter it was.’ Alexander Zverkovich’s name is one of the seven on the list of those who died at Badaber.

The whole truth—even the names of those who died—may never be known for sure. The Pakistani intelligence authorities refused to release whatever documents they may have had, and other accounts of the tragedy were based on circumstance, hearsay, and wishful thinking.²⁷

Within weeks of sending the troops into Afghanistan, the Politburo was already talking about how to get them out again. After visiting Kabul in February 1980, Andropov reported that the situation was becoming more stable, although the Afghan government needed to overcome their domestic dissensions, improve the fighting capacity of their army, and strengthen their links with the people. Ustinov was cautious: it would be a year, or even two, before the troops could be withdrawn. Brezhnev agreed; and suggested that it might even be necessary to increase the numbers somewhat. Gromyko thought it would be prudent first to seek guarantees of Afghanistan’s security from China, Pakistan, and others.¹

The caution was entirely justified. The massive popular demonstrations in Kabul in late February, and the action which the 40th Army took to bring them under control, demonstrated beyond a doubt that the situation in Afghanistan was not stable at all. Major military operations started almost immediately in the Kunar Valley and in the Pandsher.

Brezhnev Looks for a Way Out

It took some time before the Soviet leaders were willing to recognise that their hope for a quick exit was vain. Brezhnev told the French President, Giscard d’Estaing, in May 1980 that he knew that the troops would have to leave: ‘I will make it my personal business to impose a political solution. You can count on me.’ A month later he ordered the withdrawal of units which were no longer needed in Afghanistan and told Andropov to discuss the details with Karmal.² In the winter of 1980–81 the Soviet Ambassador in Islamabad talked with the Pakistani President, Zia ul-Haq (1924–88), about the possibility of talks under the auspices of the United Nations. Ustinov, once a hawk, began to have serious doubts, and wrote to the Politburo saying that no military solution to the war was possible, and it was necessary to find a political and diplomatic way out.³ Andropov, too, had lost his appetite for foreign adventures: when the Polish crisis blew up later in 1980, he said, ‘The quota of interventions abroad has been exhausted.’⁴ In the autumn of 1981 he and Ustinov sponsored a paper by the Foreign Ministry proposing proximity talks between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Andropov succeeded Brezhnev in November 1982. At Brezhnev’s funeral he assured Zia ul-Haq of the ‘Soviet side’s new flexible policy and its willingness to bring an early solution to the crisis.’⁵ The only condition was that Pakistan stop its aid to the mujahedin. By then Gromyko had already chaired an interdepartmental meeting on plans for a Soviet withdrawal.

In February 1983 Andropov told the Secretary General of the UN with considerable force that the Soviet Union had no intention of keeping its troops in Afghanistan indefinitely. The operation was expensive; the Soviet Union had plenty of domestic problems; and the war had complicated the Soviet Union’s relationships with the United States, the Third World, and the Islamic world. Speaking very slowly and emphasising each word, he added that he sincerely wanted ‘to put an end to this situation’. The argument, commonly bandied about in the West, that Soviet troops had never withdrawn from any country where they had once been stationed was disproved by history. But others were interfering in Afghanistan’s affairs. ‘Soviet troops would have to stay for as long as necessary because this is a matter which concerns the security of the Soviet Union’s southern border.’⁶

Andropov’s good intentions were undermined by his own failing health and by the shooting down by Soviet fighters of a Korean airliner on 1 September 1983, which led immediately to further worldwide condemnation of the Soviet Union for what President Reagan called a ‘massacre’. His efforts ran out of steam even before he died in January 1984.

His successor, Konstantin Chernenko, was also seriously ill and barely able to take a grip on policy. He died on 10 March 1985. By now it was obvious to the senior Soviet politicians that the Soviet system was not working as it should. Within hours of Chernenko’s death they elected Mikhail Gorbachev as his successor, because he was young, energetic, imaginative, and—they believed—orthodox.

Gorbachev Moves

Gorbachev came to power determined to press ahead for a solution in Afghanistan. As a first step he requested a policy review from the Committee on Afghanistan, which was told to look into ‘the consequences, pluses, and minuses of a withdrawal’. Later he decided that this committee of old men was a brake on progress and abolished it.⁷

Some Western accounts said that Gorbachev gave the generals a year to finish the job by military means, and that in 1985–6 the pace of the fighting was increased to the highest level of the war. Kryuchkov, always a hostile witness, claimed that Gorbachev first criticised the Ministry of Defence for not prosecuting the war more energetically, but soon swung to the other extreme.⁸ There were of course some major military operations in 1985, notably the Kunar offensive in May–June. The Special Forces Brigade was introduced in the same year, as the Russians moved away from massive ground operations towards more flexible actions in support of the Afghan army, backed where necessary by long-range bombers from Soviet territory. But Soviet casualties peaked in the period before Gorbachev came to power and began to fall from May 1985 onwards. That is hardly compatible with a ‘Gorbachev surge’.⁹

Whatever the truth of the story, Gorbachev made up his mind well before the year had expired. In October 1985 he summoned Babrak Karmal to Moscow and raised the prospect of Soviet withdrawal. Karmal was shocked to realise that the Russians needed him less than he needed them. He went white and said, ‘If you withdraw the troops now, next time you will have to send in a million.’¹⁰ Gorbachev told him that Afghanistan would have to be able to defend itself by the summer of 1986. The Soviet Union would no longer help with troops, though it would continue to supply military equipment. Karmal should forget about socialism, share power with others, including the mujahedin leaders and others who were now his enemies, and restore the rights of religion and the religious leaders.

Anatoli Chernyaev, the former Party official whom Gorbachev had appointed as his diplomatic adviser earlier in the year, commented in his diary, ‘Ten of our boys are dying every day. The people are disenchanted and ask: How long are our troops going to remain there? And when will the Afghans learn to defend themselves? The main thing is that there is no popular base, and without that no revolution can defend itself. What’s recommended is a sharp U-turn, back to free capitalism, to Afghan and Islamic values, to a real division of power with the opposition and even with the enemy… I advised that a compromise should be sought even with the leaders of the mujahedin, and of course with the emigration. Will Karmal go that far? Above all, is he capable, is he sufficiently in command of the situation, for his present enemies to go to meet him?’¹¹

Gorbachev now made clear to the Politburo that he was determined to grasp the nettle. Deliberately playing on his listeners’ emotions, he read out letters received in the Central Committee from the parents of those who had died.¹² Many were signed. Women spoke of the moral as well as the physical damage being done to their sons. Officers, and even one general, said that they were no longer able to explain to their men what the war was about. Soldiers complained that, because of the press restrictions, the newspapers were reporting that all the fighting was being done by the Afghan army, which was the opposite of the truth. ‘In whose name are we in Afghanistan? Do the Afghans themselves want us to do our “international duty” in their country? Is it worth the lives of our boys, who don’t understand what they are fighting for? What are you doing, throwing young recruits against professional killers and gangsters? You people in the Politburo made a mistake, and it is up to you to put it right—the sooner the better, while every day sees more casualties.’ The Politburo agreed with Gorbachev’s conclusion that the object of Soviet policy should now be to build up the Afghan state and leave.¹³

Gorbachev went public in February 1986, when he told the delegates to the XXVIIth Party Congress in Moscow that the Soviet troops would leave once a political solution had been negotiated which left Afghanistan as a friendly, independent, and non-aligned state, with guarantees against external interference in its affairs.

Although the war was by now increasingly unpopular among the people and the military, it was not of course enough for Gorbachev simply to take the decision to leave. He had also to face up to a difficult problem of domestic politics which has puzzled other nations finding themselves in similar circumstances. How could the Russians withdraw their army safely, with honour, without looking as if they were simply cutting and running, and without appearing to betray their Afghan allies or their own soldiers who had died? The 40th Army had not been defeated on the battlefield; but how was the obvious blow to the prestige of the Soviet Union and its army to be avoided?

Moreover, Gorbachev had to persuade the other parties to the war—the mujahedin, eternally warring among themselves but determined to get rid of the godless Communists in Kabul; the Pakistanis, who wanted to see a friendly Islamist government there; and the Americans, many of whom wished to wipe out the memory of defeat in Vietnam by making the Russians pay the highest possible price in blood and humiliation, at whatever cost in Russian, or indeed Afghan, lives. It is not surprising that the negotiations went on much longer than Gorbachev had envisaged.

The first need was to beef up the Afghan government. The Russians had lost faith in Babrak Karmal: they found him weak, indecisive, and increasingly addicted to drink. In April 1986 they decided that he must go. Gorbachev called on him in a Kremlin hospital where he was being treated for kidney trouble, but failed to get him to leave quietly. Karmal returned to Kabul in a huff and on 1 May Kryuchkov was sent to have another go at him. Their first meeting was interrupted by a noisy street demonstration of support for Karmal. Kryuchkov said coldly that he knew perfectly well how such demonstrations were organised and within five minutes the demonstrators had dispersed. On that visit Kryuchkov got nowhere. But he returned to Kabul a few days later and, after twenty solid hours of persuasion, Karmal finally agreed to resign.¹⁴ The reason given publicly was that he was suffering from ill-health, a line which was somewhat dented when the Soviet doctors, who had not been properly briefed, reported that his health was fine.¹⁵ He was replaced by the younger and more effective Najibullah, the head of the secret police, the KhAD. Karmal hung on as President, without effective power, until Najibullah was elected to the post in November 1986. He then went to Moscow—ostensibly for medical treatment, but actually into permanent exile—and died there a decade later.

Najibullah was not without his critics. A GRU analysis of April 1986 showed, once again, the divergence of views between parts of the Soviet military, who favoured the Khalq faction and their officers in the army, and the KGB, who favoured the Parcham faction represented by Karmal and Najibullah. Speculating on rumours that Najibullah might succeed Karmal, the GRU analysts said that Afghan politicians regarded him as a strong personality. But they feared the power he had exercised through the KhAD, which he had exploited for his own purposes, and whose brutalities he had done nothing to mitigate. Under his regime, the Pul-i Charkhi prison had filled up with Khalqists. He was notoriously a Pushtun nationalist. He was regularly accused of allowing theft, bribery, and corruption on a scale previously unknown. The GRU were not at all sure of his loyalty to the Soviet Union: he had not studied there and, unlike many other Afghan Communist leaders, he had no military experience. The GRU concluded, ‘He will not be able to unite the party, the army, and the people to bring about peace.’¹⁶

These views were not shared by General Varennikov, the most senior soldier in Afghanistan at the time. Najibullah’s candidature was also favoured by Kryuchkov. His Pushtun nationalism undermined his ability to persuade the Tajiks and others of the virtues of his Policy of National Reconciliation—an inability which was to prove fatal in the civil war which followed the Soviet withdrawal. But there were no other obvious candidates. And whatever Najibullah’s weaknesses, most observers, then and since, agreed that he had many of the qualities of an effective leader: he was able, energetic, willing to try new ideas, and a good public speaker. Kryuchkov and Shevardnadze, the Soviet Foreign Minister, became his particular advocates in Moscow, and were strongly critical of the way he was eventually abandoned by the Soviet and later the Russian regime. Their commitment to Najibullah led to many conflicts within the Politburo in the last year of the war.

But however able Najibullah was as a leader, the real power had still not shifted sufficiently. The bloated body of Soviet advisers in Afghanistan—two and a half thousand of them in 1986—continued to get in Najibullah’s way. ‘We’re still doing everything ourselves,’ complained Gorbachev. ‘That’s all our people know how to do. They’ve tied Najibullah hand and foot.’ Gorbachev grumbled that Tabeev, the Soviet Ambassador, was acting like a governor general, telling Najibullah that it was he who had made him General Secretary.¹⁷ Tabeev was recalled in July 1986. But despite his determination that the Afghans should take responsibility for their own fate, even Gorbachev could not resist trying to micromanage Afghan politics. And the Russians soon began to have doubts about Najibullah too. ‘It’s difficult to build a new building out of old material,’ Gorbachev remarked to the Politburo. ‘I hope to God that we haven’t made a mistake with Najibullah.’

The problem was that Najibullah’s aims were almost diametrically opposed to those of the Russians. It was in his interest, by fair means or foul, to get the Soviet soldiers to remain. For how else were he and his government to survive once they left, as the rebels got stronger and his own forces teetered on the brink of dissolution? He accepted that some negotiation and compromise with the opposition side was unavoidable: his Policy of National Reconciliation was designed to bring moderate representatives of the political opposition and the mullahs into government. But Najibullah was determined that the PDPA should keep the key political and administrative posts, including the ministries of Defence, Internal Affairs and Security; and he was unwilling to cooperate with non-Pushtun politicians. This was not all that different from the policy which Karmal had attempted to pursue. Najibullah pursued it with greater energy and was more willing to try to win over the mujahedin commanders. But the rebels were as suspicious of him as of his predecessor, and his olive branch found few takers.

Many Russians no longer cared much about the composition of the government in Kabul anyway. For them the most important thing was to create a respectable cover for withdrawal, in the meanwhile cutting down the scope of military operations and reducing casualties to a minimum.¹⁸ The Soviet generals were not too happy about that. They had a war to fight and the restrictions which were now placed on them went against their instincts. For the most part they gritted their teeth and did what they were told. But the old conflicts of interest between the main Soviet institutions in Moscow—the army, the KGB, the Party, and the government—and their representatives in Kabul continued to dog the course of the Soviet withdrawal, at times raising serious doubts over its timing and manner. Najibullah exploited the differences with skill.

In July 1986 Gorbachev withdrew six regiments from Afghanistan. That showed, he told the Politburo, that the USSR did not intend to stay in Afghanistan or to ‘break through to the warm ocean’. The Soviet Union was matching deeds to words. Najibullah needed to understand that and to take matters into his own hands. This was a genuine reduction of fifteen thousand in the 40th Army’s strength. It brought the Russians no credit in the outside world, where it was dismissed as a propaganda stunt.¹⁹

In November 1986 Gorbachev spelled out the issues to the Politburo yet again. ‘We’ve been fighting for six years already! Some people are saying that if we go on like this, the war could last for twenty or thirty years… People are beginning to ask, Are we going to sit there for ever? Or should we finish off this war? If we don’t, we will cover ourselves with shame in every respect. The strategic objective is to finish off the war in one or at the most two years and withdraw our forces.’ Shevardnadze added that the Soviets needed to decide who was in charge on their own side: was it the army or was it the KGB?

The military situation was clearly still unsatisfactory. The Russians had failed to close the Afghan frontier. The rebels had changed tactics and gone underground. Akhromeev, by now the Chief of the General Staff, said what many of his soldiers had been telling him for some time: ‘In the past seven years Soviet soldiers have had their boots on the ground in every square kilometre of the country. But as soon as they left, the enemy returned and restored everything the way it was before. We have lost this war. The majority of the Afghan people support the counter-revolution. We have lost the peasantry, who have got nothing from the revolution. Eighty per cent of the country is in the hands of the counter-revolution. And the position of the peasants there is better than it is in the territory controlled by the government.’

The Politburo agreed that the aim was no longer to build socialism in Afghanistan, but to withdraw half of the Soviet troops in one year and the remainder in two; to broaden the political and social base of the regime; and then leave them to get on with it. Gorbachev proposed direct negotiations with Pakistan.²⁰

The Politburo’s next discussion in January 1987 was a gloomy occasion. The difficulty of withdrawing with honour had become increasingly apparent. As Gorbachev said, ‘We could leave quickly, without worrying about the consequences, and blame everything on our predecessors. But that we cannot do. We have not given an account of ourselves to the people. A million of our soldiers have passed through Afghanistan. [He was badly briefed: it was about six hundred thousand.] And it looks as if they did so in vain. So why did those people die?’

Shevardnadze had just visited Kabul. He reported that the traditional goodwill towards the Soviet Union had gone. Too many people had died. ‘[W]e went in without knowing anything at all about the psychology of the people, and that’s a fact. And everything we have done and are doing in Afghanistan is incompatible with the moral basis of our country.’ Najibullah made a good impression, but his support was crumbling. The military situation was getting worse. It was impossible to close the border with Pakistan. The war could not be won by military means. Summing up, Gorbachev pointed out that in Poland, despite ideological misgivings, the Soviet Union had accepted the position of the Church, private agriculture, political pluralism. One had to face reality. It was better to pay with treasure than with blood.

In January a Deputy Foreign Minister, Anatoli Kovalev, went to Pakistan to talk to President Zia ul-Haq. In February Gorbachev re-emphasised the importance of involving the Americans and suggested that he might invite Zia ul-Haq for talks to Tashkent. When Gromyko argued that there was no alternative to a military withdrawal, Gorbachev replied sharply, ‘There is an alternative. We could bring in two hundred thousand more troops. But that would lead to the collapse of our whole cause.’²¹

The Politburo met again in May 1987, with senior officials from Kabul in attendance, including Varennikov. By now, they lamented, the Afghan army was falling apart; the Americans and the Pakistanis were doing all they could to undermine the Policy of National Reconciliation; and Najibullah was failing to get a grip. Akhromeev argued that making Najibullah the centrepiece of a new political line-up would simply lead to endless fighting. Gorbachev said that there was no one else. The Russians would be accused of treachery if they simply abandoned him: ‘We won’t be able to explain that to our own people. And in Afghanistan the supporters of the mujahedin will remember for a long time how we destroyed them, and the supporters of Najibullah will remember how we left them in the same boat as their enemies. We will be left with an unfriendly Afghanistan. But at the same time we can’t go on with this war for ever.’

Summing up a somewhat despairing discussion, Gorbachev concluded that the UN and the Americans needed to be more fully involved. The UN could provide a neutral framework for negotiation. The Americans were by far the largest suppliers of arms to the mujahedin, and no guarantee of non-interference would hold without them.²² Najibullah should be given more economic aid, but be firmly told that the Russians intended to finish with the Afghan question in eighteen months. Ways should be found of associating with the government, the mujahedin, the exiled king, Zahir Shah, and moderates such as Rabbani.²³

The Diplomatic Manoeuvring

The next ten months were taken up with diplomatic manoeuvring in Geneva, Islamabad, Moscow, New York, and Washington, against the background of the UN negotiations, which had sputtered on since 1982. The Americans had in fact been involved from the earliest days of the Reagan presidency. Jack Matlock, the US Chargé d’Affaires in Moscow in 1981, was instructed to tell the Russians that the Americans would ‘discuss ways to ensure the security of the Soviet Union’s southern border and also make a commitment not to use the territory of Afghanistan against the Soviet Union’. The message received no response. After the Geneva Summit, Reagan wrote to Gorbachev on 28 November 1985 saying, ‘I want you to know that I am prepared to cooperate in any reasonable way to facilitate [a Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan] in a manner which does not damage Soviet security.’²⁴ This letter too received no response.

Now, in 1987, Moscow stepped up the tempo. In September Shevardnadze told US Secretary of State George Shultz (1920–) that ‘we will leave Afghanistan. It may be in five months or a year.’²⁵ Shultz was struck with this news, but believed that it would fall foul of the right-wingers in Reagan’s cabinet. He kept it to himself for weeks, for fear he would be accused of going soft on Moscow.²⁶

Three months later Gorbachev told Reagan that he agreed that Afghanistan should be neutral, independent, and pluralistic. Afghanistan was not a socialist state. How it developed was a matter for the Afghans themselves. The Soviet Union needed a friendly Afghanistan, but was not seeking bases there. Both the Americans and the Russians should back the process of National Reconciliation. The Americans should cease their support for the mujahedin. Once there was an agreed date for the withdrawal of Soviet forces, they would no longer participate in military operations. But the two men did not settle on any matter of substance. Reagan even suggested—bizarrely—that the Kabul government should disband its army.²⁷ Gorbachev left Washington with the impression that the Americans were happy to leave the Russians to flounder and even to hamper the departure of their troops.

The Russians and the Americans later disagreed on what had passed at this meeting, each believing that the other had failed to take the opportunity to make a positive move. The Russians believed that Reagan had indicated that he was willing to cut off supplies to the mujahedin. Shevardnadze so informed Najibullah—and, rather incautiously, the Afghan press—in January 1988. Shultz issued a furious denial. The Soviet Foreign Ministry asked Jack Matlock, by then ambassador in Moscow, for a clarification. After consulting Washington, he replied that the Americans would refrain from supplying the mujahedin if the Soviets cut off military supplies to the Kabul government. This was not of course a deal that the Russians could easily accept, and in the event both sides continued to supply their protégés. The Russians retained an obscure feeling that they had been somehow double-crossed.

Matlock believed in later years that agreement on an orderly withdrawal, including a provision for the Americans to cease aid to the mujahedin without the Soviets having to cut off support for Kabul, could have been reached in 1986 or 1987 if Gorbachev had been willing to engage Reagan earlier. Whether the domestic politics of either side would have permitted that is a very open question.²⁸

On 1 April 1988 the Politburo met to consider the outcome of the Geneva negotiations. The Americans were now ready to sign, provided that there was no mention of military aid to the mujahedin. Chernyaev thought that the issue was now moot: the mujahedin would get their aid whatever the final agreement said, and the Russians were preparing to withdraw their troops whether or not the agreement was signed. Gorbachev asked for views. Everyone agreed that the Soviet Union should sign. Gorbachev gave the news to Najibullah in Tashkent ten days later; he took it with apparent equanimity.²⁹

The agreements were finally signed in Geneva on 14 April 1988 under the aegis of the United Nations. A bilateral agreement between the Kabul government and Pakistan provided for non-interference and non-intervention. The Russians and the Americans signed a declaration on international guarantees. And there were provisions for the Soviet troops to withdraw in two stages by 15 February 1989. The mujahedin were not a party and refused to accept the terms. This opened the way to the fall of the Najibullah regime and the subsequent murderous civil war: the nightmare that Gorbachev had feared when he confided to Chernyaev in September 1987 that the Soviet withdrawal might be followed by a bloodbath ‘for which we would not be forgiven, either by the Third World, or by the shabby Western liberals who have spent the last ten years lambasting us for occupying the place’.³⁰

Shevardnadze signed in Geneva with a heavy heart. ‘One would have thought I would have been happy: no more coffins were coming home. We’ll close the account: both of the deaths and of the drain on our resources, which had reached 60 billion roubles… It was hard for me to realise that I was the Foreign Minister who had signed what was certainly not an agreement about a victory. There aren’t many examples of that in Russian or Soviet history. And I couldn’t stop thinking about the people we had trained up, pushed into a revolution, and were now abandoning to face a mortal foe alone.’³¹ Such sentiments were to affect the policy advice he gave over the next two years.

‘We will leave the country in a deplorable situation,’ he told the Politburo on his return, ‘ruined cities and villages, a paralysed economy. Hundreds of thousands of people have died. Our withdrawal will be regarded as a major political and military defeat. Within the Party and among the people the attitude to our departure is ambiguous. We must at least announce that the introduction of our troops was a gross error, that even then the experts and the public were against that adventure… We may not be able to distance ourselves easily from the past by arguing that we do not bear responsibility for our predecessors.’ He suggested that ten to fifteen thousand Soviet troops should be left behind to support the regime, a proposal clearly at odds with the agreement he had just signed. Kryuchkov supported him. Gorbachev reacted strongly to what he called ‘Shevardnadze’s hawkish scream’. It did not matter, he said, whether Najibullah survived or not. The legal basis for the Soviet withdrawal meant that it could not be compared with the way the Americans had bolted from Vietnam. Everything possible had been done to limit the negative consequences of the war.³²

Disagreements about how far the Russians should assist Najibullah—if necessary by using military force—continued to bedevil Soviet policymaking until well after the withdrawal was completed. Shevardnadze and Kryuchkov continued their hawkish stance, opposed for the most part by the military.

The First Phase of the Withdrawal: Summer 1988

The Defence Minister, General Yazov, had already issued plans for the withdrawal. The total Soviet force now numbered about a hundred thousand. Half would leave by 15 August 1988, the remainder by 15 February 1989. The routes would be the same as those for the original invasion, but in reverse: in the west from Kandahar via Shindand and Herat to Kushka; in the east over the Salang Pass to Khairaton and across the Friendship Bridge to Termez.

The first move was to bring outlying garrisons into their parent regiments. The garrisons on the eastern border with Pakistan—Jalalabad, Gardez, and Ghazni—were withdrawn completely. So were the southward-facing garrisons in Kandahar and Lashkar Gar. The Russians also pulled out of their positions in the north-east in Kunduz and Faisabad. By the end of the first phase, the Soviet forces were concentrated between Shindand and Kushka in the west, and between Kabul and the great supply base of Khairaton in the east.

The garrison from Jalalabad was the first to leave. A tribunal was hastily erected on the parade ground for the benefit of the senior Soviet officers and Afghan local politicians. A group of uncommunicative UN military observers was there to ensure that the Geneva Agreements were properly carried out. Behind the tribunal was a buffet loaded with ham, sausage, cheese—things the garrison never normally saw. At dawn the armoured vehicles were drawn up on the square, their crews beside them. Their faces were grim, unsmiling, exhausted, as they listened to the endless speeches. Their officers congratulated them on having fulfilled their ‘international duty’. Crowds of Afghans gathered to wave them goodbye. They threw bouquets of flowers at the departing troops. Among the flowers were other small gifts: stones and pieces of camel dung.³³ Then the orchestra played the traditional march, ‘The Slav Girl’s Farewell’, and the column started on the hundred mile journey to Kabul, through the passes where the British Army of the Indus had been wiped out in January 1842. The battle helicopters clattered overhead to protect it from attack, turning aside to investigate when little puffs of gun smoke from the mountainsides revealed the presence of snipers.

‘All along the way,’ wrote David Gai, a Soviet journalist who accompanied the column, ‘was what remained of the roadside kishlaks. Not one was undamaged: the walls were overturned, the houses were smashed, the trees were twisted. The fields were bare and uncultivated, the irrigation systems had been turned into marsh. And who had gained from the way everything had been reduced to useless collapse? How much effort would have to be put into restoring life to that dead space? The futility of those 3,200 (or however many it was) days of war made one’s eyes burn with shame… The only good thing was that the boys were going home.’³⁴

Soviet long-range bombers continued to strike mujahedin positions around Kandahar and Jalalabad after the troops had left.³⁵

The 860th Independent Motor-rifle Regiment also left Afghanistan as part of the first wave. By then Alexander Gergel had long returned home. He got the story of his battalion’s last days in Bakharak from Anastas Lizauskas, whom he tracked down on the Internet in 2005.

The fighting went on to the last. The rumour spread among the soldiers that a foreign film maker, who had made one film about the Russians destroying peaceful villages, now wanted to make another about the destruction of a Soviet battalion. He encouraged the mujahedin to attack. The Russians and the mujahedin bombarded one another inconclusively for a week. As an Afghan general came to take over the fort the soldiers, furious at leaving with their tails between their legs after nine years of war, erupted in an orgy of destruction. They put shells down the lavatories, destroyed the sports facilities, set fire to the sleeping quarters, knocked down the memorials in the Alley of Glory, and destroyed the vehicles while the Afghan soldiers looked on in silent rage. As a final gesture, someone fired a signal rocket into the canteen. Then the soldiers, each with his personal weapon and as much loot as he could squeeze into a sack, hurried to the helicopters. The mujahedin were already closing in from the mountains. A week later the Afghan soldiers handed the fort over to the mujahedin. It was destroyed in subsequent months by a series of strikes by Soviet and Afghan government aircraft.³⁶

The Second Phase of the Withdrawal: Winter 1988–9

The second phase of the withdrawal was supposed to begin in November, before the heavy snows settled. This timetable was disrupted by the mujahedin, by Najibullah’s government, and by conflicts within the Soviet administration both in Kabul and in Moscow.

The mujahedin were still receiving arms and other supplies from the Pakistanis and the Americans. According to Soviet figures, 172 large caravans arrived in September and October alone.³⁷ By now Najibullah was deeply worried that his interests and those of the Soviet Union were rapidly diverging. In early September he told Varennikov with remarkable frankness that he was doing everything he could to slow the departure of the Soviet forces so as to offset American and Pakistani violations of the Geneva Agreements. Varennikov told Najibullah firmly that both Soviet and international opinion would be incensed if the Soviet troops did not leave on time.³⁸ Najibullah returned to the charge in October, when he met the senior Soviet representatives in Kabul. Masud was the main problem, he said, and would have to be dealt with by military means if negotiation failed. He claimed for good measure that Masud was plotting with the CIA to let in the Americans.³⁹

There was sympathy for Najibullah both in Moscow and among the senior Russians in Kabul: they had put him in place and they could not with honour abandon him. For them, too, the main problem was Masud; but they disagreed among themselves on what should be done. Once it was clear that the Soviets were indeed going to withdraw, Masud’s men had been careful to avoid provocation, especially along the Salang Highway. But government forces were continuing to fire upon the neighbouring villages, and Masud warned that if this did not stop, he would take counter-measures. Varennikov helped negotiate a temporary ceasefire: by now it had become normal for Soviet commanders of all levels to make such arrangements with the elders of nearby kishlaks and the commanders of rebel groupings as a way of reducing losses.⁴⁰ But the practice was not appreciated or understood by the Afghan government leaders, who believed that the Russians were intriguing with the opposition because they did not want to fight.

Varennikov believed that the Russians had an interest in remaining on reasonable terms with Masud. Masud was highly effective militarily, he commanded unequalled authority among the people, he had ordered his men not to attack the Soviet forces, and he was being obeyed. Although he remained a determined opponent of the government, in accordance with the Policy of National Reconciliation his forces fired only if they were fired on. Varennikov pointed out to Moscow that if the Russians did what Najibullah wanted, and resumed military action against Masud, the 40th Army would suffer heavy losses, the withdrawal timetable would be disrupted, the Soviet Union would be in breach of the Geneva Agreements, and domestic opinion would be outraged. Masud was of course the main threat to the Kabul regime, and would probably step up his military activity once the Soviets had left. But in the long run he could become a major political figure in post-war Afghanistan, someone with whom the Soviet Union could cooperate. It was better to have him as an ally than an enemy. The Soviets should get into direct contact with him through intelligence channels.⁴¹

At this point a new player arrived on the scene: Yuli Vorontsov, Yegorychev’s replacement as ambassador in Kabul, and one of the Soviet Union’s most experienced diplomats. Vorontsov had already had some direct dealings with the mujahedin. On 6 December he met Rabbani and other representatives of the Alliance of Seven in Saudi Arabia.⁴² The meeting got off to an awkward start until Rabbani decided that he could after all shake hands with the representative of the enemy. Vorontsov said that the Soviets would leave as they had promised. Rabbani clearly thought he was lying and said, ‘What do you mean, you’re leaving? You have put so much into Afghanistan. So many of your people have died there. You’re not going to leave. Stop talking rubbish!’ Vorontsov replied that from now on Afghans like Rabbani were going to have to be responsible for their own country. Once the Soviets left, Afghanistan could expect no more assistance from them. He repeated the message when he met the mujahedin again in Islamabad. The Russians did not want to leave in a welter of blood, said Vorontsov, and appealed to them to respond in kind. They replied, ‘If you really leave, then we won’t shoot at you.’ They more or less kept their promise.⁴³

On 18 December Varennikov wrote to Masud direct. He suggested that representatives from both sides should meet within a week. He made concrete proposals for managing the highway from Kabul to Khairaton to ensure that food and other goods continued to flow. If Masud was willing to guard the highway, the necessary agreements should be signed with the local authorities along the road. If not, the Soviet and Afghan forces would set up their own posts; and would take appropriate measures if Masud’s men fired on them.

Lyakhovski drew up a list of political propositions to be discussed with Masud. These included the creation of an autonomous Tajik region in the north, with its own armed forces operating under the general authority of the Afghan military; a centrally backed plan for economic development; representation in the organs of central government; direct trade and economic and cultural links between the autonomous Tajik region and their cousins in Soviet Tajikistan. These ideas were approved by Varennikov, Vorontsov, and, rather surprisingly, the Afghan leadership.

They did not, however, survive the strong pressure for military action against Masud which had now developed in Moscow. Yazov, Kryuchkov, and Shevardnadze all favoured it, and accused Varennikov of conspiring behind the backs of his superiors and refusing to carry out their orders and the requests of the Afghan government.⁴⁴ Yazov rang Gromov direct to ask why Masud had not yet been dealt with. When Gromov objected that the operation would be bloody and pointless, Yazov said, ‘Get on with it, and smash him.’

The military caved, and launched air strikes against Masud’s men deployed around the lapis lazuli mines outside the Pandsher itself. Masud was told that the strikes were a deliberate warning. Inevitably he regarded them as a serious breach of faith by the Russians. His reply was swift and conclusive. He wrote on 26 December: ‘I was already wanting to go to meet the Soviet representatives when I got your last letter. I will speak quite plainly. We have already had to bear this war and your invasion for ten years. God willing, we will manage to stick it out for a few more days. But if you take military action, we will resist appropriately. That is all I have to say! From today we will put our detachments and groups on full military alert.’

That was the last attempt by the Soviet military to negotiate with Masud. But there was to be one more military action against him. In the middle of January Shevardnadze visited Kabul. Najibullah asked that Soviet troops should remain—temporarily—to guard the Salang Highway; and that Soviet bombers should be on permanent alert at bases close to Afghanistan to strike the rebels if necessary. He complained that no major operation had been mounted against Masud for four whole years. As long as Masud survived, it would be impossible to get supplies through to the capital. That was the key to whether the present regime lived or died. Shevardnadze pointed out the international implications: Najibullah’s proposal would bring the Soviet Union into conflict with the USA and Pakistan. But he promised to look into the matter and told the senior Soviet representatives in Kabul that, to prevent a blockade of the capital, Soviet forces should remain, perhaps indefinitely, to guard Kabul airport and the road across the Salang. He instructed the embassy to work out a plan to leave twelve thousand soldiers behind, either under UN auspices or as ‘volunteers’.

Varennikov and his colleagues were furious at what they saw as yet another betrayal of the military by Shevardnadze and the other politicians to serve Najibullah’s political ambitions. Gritting their teeth, they put the withdrawal on hold while they planned for what they called, perhaps with deliberate irony, Operation Typhoon, the code name which the Germans had given to their offensive against Moscow in 1941. The operation was due to begin on 24 January. Najibullah appealed to the population along the road to move out for the time being. Heavy artillery and rocket launchers were put in place.

Meanwhile Shevardnadze forwarded to Moscow another proposal from Najibullah that the Soviets should send a brigade to lift the blockade of Kandahar and protect arms convoys to the city. When he heard of it, Chernyaev exploded. ‘Has he gone off his head? Doesn’t he see Najibullah is laying a trap to ensure we don’t leave, and to embroil us with the Americans and the whole of the rest of the world? Or hasn’t he got the guts to produce the counter-arguments?’ Najibullah’s regime was finished anyway: all the Soviets could now do was save his skin. Chernyaev listened in as Gorbachev phoned Shevardnadze. Shevardnadze started to blame the military. Chernyaev interrupted: ‘All the military have done is to work out the technicalities of the political plan which you’ve agreed with Najibullah. But that plan is clean contrary to our whole policy, and to plain common sense, without mentioning the losses to which you will be exposing our boys.’

‘You’ve not been there,’ replied Shevardnadze angrily. ‘You’ve no idea all the things we have done there in the past ten years!’

‘But why should we compound our crimes! What’s the logic in that? We’re not going to be able to save Najibullah anyway…’

‘But he says that if he can hold out for a year after we leave, he will be able to survive indefinitely…’

‘And you believe that? And for that you’re ready to sacrifice our boys and break the engagement we gave in Geneva?’⁴⁵

The Politburo met on 24 January. Shevardnadze insisted that the Soviet Union could not be indifferent to the fate of Najibullah’s regime. Ten to fifteen thousand Soviet troops should be left behind, not least because they would be guarding the roads along which the army would withdraw. Once again he was supported by Kryuchkov. But Gorbachev summed up against him. The Soviet Union had a moral obligation towards Najibullah: everything should be done to help him survive as long as he could. But there were only twenty days left and the withdrawal was to be completed on time.

Operation Typhoon

The Politburo decision came too late to halt Typhoon. Yazov had already ordered Varennikov to begin the operation a day early, on 23 January. It lasted for two days.⁴⁶ The morale of the troops was by now at rock bottom. Why, the soldiers wondered, should they risk their lives yet again, on the eve of departure for a homeland where, they knew, the war was seen as unjust, no better than the American performance in Vietnam. One young officer asked his superior on the eve of the operation, ‘Why does there have to be more bloodshed?… I will try to encourage the men in my battalion. But I tell you frankly, that if I am ordered to shoot, I will carry out the order, but I will hate myself.’⁴⁷

Fighter bombers and heavy bombers from bases inside the Soviet Union launched more than a thousand sorties against the rebel bases. More than four hundred strikes were carried out by rocket and conventional artillery. At times the bombardment resembled the massive storm of artillery which preceded the Red Army’s great offensives in the Second World War.⁴⁸ After it was over, the staff of the 40th Army reported that six hundred rebels had been killed. The survivors were demoralised, and continued air and artillery strikes were preventing them from regrouping and bringing up reinforcements. A tented camp had been put up for the civilian refugees, and army political officers were busy explaining to them that what had happened was the consequence of Masud’s ‘criminal position’. The Soviets lost three dead and five wounded. They did not try to count the civilian dead.

Masud’s reaction was swift and bitter. Nothing, he wrote to Vorontsov, had been changed by the ‘cruel and shameful actions’ of the Russians. Ten years of a horrible war should have taught the Soviets that the Afghan people could not be brought to their knees by force and threats. Instead the Russians were continuing to support ‘a handful of hirelings, who have betrayed themselves and for whom there is no place in the future of the country’. He hoped that the new Soviet leadership would understand that they could not impose a dying regime on a Muslim people, and that they would gather the courage to act in accordance with reality and with their own convictions.⁴⁹

The judgement of the Soviet military was just as bitter. General Sotskov, who was the Chief Soviet Military Adviser in Kabul in 1988 and 1989, wrote of Operation Typhoon, ‘Almost ten years of the war were reflected as if in a mirror in three days and three nights: political cynicism and military cruelty, the absolute defencelessness of some and the pathological need to kill and destroy of others. Three awful days absorbed in themselves ten years of bloodletting.’⁵⁰

Once Operation Typhoon was over, the Soviet withdrawal resumed on 27 January. Civilians and soldiers had been pulling out since the New Year—the families had left earlier. The weather conditions were exceptionally difficult, with snow, fog, and icy roads especially on the Salang Pass. Avalanches formed obstacles of snow and stone for many miles which had to be cleared by the engineers. But the work was done, and the long columns of armoured vehicles and lorries continued to move north according to the timetable set by the generals and the Geneva Agreements.⁵¹

The Soviet aircraft based in Bagram flew out between 30 January and 3 February. By 4 February the last troops had left Kabul. As they moved north the guard battalions placed to secure their passage folded seamlessly in behind them. In these two last weeks of the war the Russians lost thirty-nine more men. One of them was Igor Lakhovich, of the 345th Guards Independent Parachute Assault Regiment, who was shot by a sniper and left Afghanistan wrapped in a groundsheet and bound to the deck of a BMP, according to legend the last Soviet soldier to be killed in the war.

General Sebrov, who had entered Afghanistan with the 103rd Division in 1979, was not impressed by the official speeches, the crowds, and the flowers. He summed it up bitterly: ‘The country we had been helping in every possible way for ten years now lay in ruins. Everyone had contributed to the destruction… but a significant part of the blame lay on us. It was impossible not to be struck by the change in people’s attitude to our army and our soldiers. We were greeted with sympathy and friendship when we came in. Now the ordinary Afghans threatened and insulted us as we departed.’⁵²

Crossing the Bridge

General Gromov, the commander of the 40th Army, woke up as usual, and in a good mood, at half past six on 14 February 1989 in Tashkurgan, about an hour’s drive from the frontier. Once upon a time Tashkurgan boasted an ancient and famously beautiful market, but that was destroyed in the fighting. For much of the war it was the base of a motor-rifle regiment, and since January it had been the last headquarters of the 40th Army. Now the Afghans were wandering around the place as if they owned it, working out the value of the buildings of which they were soon to take possession. At ten o’clock Gromov’s small column, the Reconnaissance Battalion of the 201st Division, set out for Khairaton, the transit base on the Afghan side of the river.

Here, as Gromov and his colleagues set down once again to check that no one from the 40th Army had been left behind, there was a panicky call from Yazov. The Foreign Ministry lawyers had pointed out that the Geneva Agreements stated that the Soviet forces should be out of Afghanistan by 15 February. In other words, they should have got back to the Soviet Union by 14th February. Gromov replied that he had already spoken to the United Nations representatives, who had decided to turn a blind eye. Then Yazov asked, ‘Why are you intending to leave last, and not lead the troops out, as a commander should?’ Gromov said that he thought he had earned the right after serving more than five years in Afghanistan. Yazov was obstinately silent.

All day the soldiers and officers checked their vehicles and cleaned up their best uniforms, while Gromov went to look at the transit base. It was so huge that he would have needed a week to explore it all. There were great stores of tractors, agricultural vehicles, roofing material, cement, sugar, flour. His Afghan guide showed him one container that had been sealed since it had arrived in 1979 until a few days earlier, when it had been opened. It was full of cakes and confectionery, which had all quietly rotted away.

On returning to his soldiers, Gromov paraded them to make sure they were fully prepared for the next day’s event. He had his own vehicle—BTR No. 305—inspected and checked and then inspected again. The last thing he wanted was for it to break down in the middle of the bridge.

He did not sleep well that last night. He felt emptied of emotion: the exhilaration of the previous days had evaporated. He dozed off at four o’clock, but woke up even before his alarm clock rang. By five o’clock the base was already coming alive. Soldiers were moving about and laughing, and the first vehicles were warming up their engines. Someone started to sing.

At nine o’clock Gromov called in his adjutant to check that his uniform was in order and at nine thirty he gave the order to move. The battalion’s armoured personnel carriers passed before him on to the bridge. Some of the soldiers were weeping. At nine forty-five Gromov followed them in his command vehicle, carrying the banner of the 40th Army. It was the last vehicle across. The withdrawal was complete.⁵³

The other side of the river was crowded with local Party and government officials, hundreds of Soviet and foreign journalists, and the relatives of soldiers who had not returned, hoping against hope to get news that they had perhaps been found safe and well at the last minute. Among the crowd was Alexander Rozenbaum, a young journalist from Severny Komsomolets, the Archangel youth newspaper. Fifty-nine boys from Archangel had been killed in Afghanistan and Rozenbaum’s moving report of the ceremony at the bridge ended with the questions which everyone was now asking: Why did we go in? Who are the guilty men?⁵⁴

People embraced the soldiers, kissed them, threw flowers under the tracks of their vehicles. Gromov’s son Maksim was there, and ran to embrace him. Then there were speeches, a meal in a nearby café for the officers. Gromov phoned Yazov, who congratulated him unenthusiastically. And then, apart for the administrative chores, it was all over.

Even now the official press was still peddling the old myths. In those very last days Pravda wrote, ‘An orchestra played as the Nation welcomed the return of her sons. Our boys were coming home after fulfilling their international obligations. For 10 years Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan repaired, rebuilt, and constructed hundreds of schools, technical colleges, over 30 hospitals and a similar number of nursery schools, some 400 blocks of flats and 35 mosques. They sank dozens of wells and dug nearly 150 km of irrigation ditches and canals. They were also engaged in guarding military and civilian installations in trouble.’⁵⁵

But there was no one from Moscow to greet the soldiers at the bridge—no one from the Party, no one from the government, no one from the Ministry of Defence, no one from the Kremlin. Years later their excuse was that it had been a dirty war, that to have made the journey to Termez would have been in effect to endorse a crime.⁵⁶ It was an extraordinary omission—very bad politics, as well as very bad behaviour. The soldiers never forgot or forgave the insult.

The men of the 40th Army who crossed the bridge were not the last Russian soldiers to leave Afghanistan, nor the last to see action there. Parachutists were stationed in the embassy grounds to guard the ambassador and his much diminished staff, who were now brought in from their outlying apartments in the microrayons and elsewhere. Soviet military specialists remained to assist the Afghan army to operate the more sophisticated equipment. And Soviet special forces and reconnaissance troops continued to operate in the outlying provinces, especially on the borders of the Soviet Union.¹

And some people were moving in the opposite direction, back to Kabul on planes that were by now half empty. When he returned at the beginning of January, Andrei Greshnov had more than 250 kilograms of hand baggage. Luckily there were no Afghan customs officers on duty as he arrived, so he did not have to explain that the jam jars and rubber-topped bottles he was carrying were full of alcohol. He and the other Soviet correspondents, who for the most part were hanging around with nothing to do, remained in their villas, but installed backup teletype machines in case something went wrong in their offices in town.

The austerity had its compensations. The embassy shop was stuffed with goodies, a rich and unfamiliar choice of food products and consumer goods: everything left in the army shops had been moved to the embassy. The spirit ration was raised to four bottles of Moldovan cognac and four bottles of white wine. The limit on beer was lifted entirely.

Before they left, the departing soldiers had sold everything that could possibly be sold: ammunition, food, blankets, sheets, consumer goods, corned beef, Greek juices, Dutch fizzy drinks, Polish and Hungarian ham, green peas, sunflower oil, tinned meats, tea, and cigarettes. So surfeited was the market that Soviet goodies remained on sale in Afghan shops for years afterwards.

One particularly imaginative racket was dreamed up by a group of warrant officers. The air force was abandoning boxes of plastic nose cones—nursiki—for their rockets. You could drink from them, but apart from that they were not much good for anything. The racketeers started by going round the shops and asking the traders if they had any nursiki for sale. The traders had never heard of nursiki and asked what they were for. ‘You wouldn’t understand,’ said the racketeers. ‘They are very useful, very scarce, and very expensive.’ After they had launched a few boxes of nose cones on to the market, the racketeers bought them back at inflated prices. The cupidity of the traders pushed the price sky high, and when demand seemed to be at its height, the racketeers sold off two lorry-loads and pulled out. When the traders complained to the Soviet Embassy, they were told, ‘If you can’t stand the heat, don’t go into the kitchen.’ Years later the traders were still wondering how they could have let themselves be so comprehensively fooled.

One thing in particular caught Greshnov’s eye in the Kabul of those last days. There was a T-62 tank on a pedestal as a monument outside the Central Committee of the National People’s Army in Kabul. It had been there for ten years at least: Greshnov had seen it at the time of the coup against Amin. He wondered whether it was still in working order. Three years later the tank was removed from its pedestal by the forces of Ahmad Shah Masud as they retreated from the capital. They filled it up with diesel, put in a new battery, and drove it off to the Pandsher Valley.²

The Civil War Continues

The 40th Army had gone, but the Afghan civil war continued with horrifying force. The morale of the mujahedin was high. Arms continued to reach them from Pakistan in contravention of the Geneva Agreements. These the Pakistanis had never had any intention of observing: President Zia ul-Haq told President Reagan that they had been denying their activities in Afghanistan for eight years, and that Muslims had the right to lie in a good cause.³ Most people predicted that the Najibullah government would soon be replaced by an Islamic, possibly fundamentalist, government which ‘at best’, the CIA observed gloomily, ‘will be ambivalent, and at worst… may be actively hostile, especially toward the United States.’⁴

For their part the Russians continued to supply Kabul with massive quantities of food, fuel, ammunition, and military equipment. A Soviet military delegation led by Varennikov visited Afghanistan at the beginning of May 1989 to discuss ways and means.⁵ By 1990 Soviet aid to the Kabul government had reached a value of $3 billion a year. The Afghan army and air force were entirely dependent on these supplies, and fought well against the mujahedin as long as the supplies continued.

A major battle erupted around the city of Jalalabad almost immediately after the 40th Army had left. The fall of this city would, the Pakistanis believed, be followed by the fall of Kabul and enable their protégé Hekmatyar to seize power.⁶ The mujahedin began their offensive at the beginning of March 1989, capturing an outlying post by bribing the officer in charge.⁷ They then attempted to take the airport, but were repulsed with heavy losses, compounded by the failure of individual mujahedin commanders to agree on a common plan. Early in the battle the mujahedin executed a number of prisoners, which reinforced the determination of the government soldiers to resist.

Once again Najibullah asked for Soviet air support. Gorbachev called an emergency meeting on 10 March to consider the request. It was rejected.⁸ But further attacks were broken up by the government’s own aircraft and by April the government troops were on the offensive. They bombarded the mujahedin with over four hundred Scud missiles developed from the Germans’ wartime V2 rockets and fired by the Soviet crews who had remained behind. Like the V2, you got no warning of the Scud’s arrival until it had exploded. ‘The mujahedin, who, one would have thought, were already inured to the use in their homeland of every kind of weapon,’ wrote Greshnov, who visited Jalalabad at the time, ‘…were psychologically unable to cope when these rockets were employed against them… Losses among the civilian population could be counted in thousands, and the battle itself acquired such a massive and brutal character that it could be compared in military terms perhaps only with the battle for Stalingrad.’⁹ The soldiers cleared the road from Kabul—the old ‘English’ road, along which the Army of the Indus had retreated in 1842—and relieved the city. By the time the battle was over, in July 1989, the mujahedin had lost more than three thousand killed and wounded. One mujahedin field commander lamented that ‘the battle of Jalalabad lost us the credit won in ten years of fighting’. In the eyes of Brigadier Mohamed Yousaf, the ISI officer responsible for supplying the mujahedin with arms for much of the war, ‘The Jehad has never recovered from Jalalabad.’ He was writing just after the war was over and predicted that the ragged end to the war would ‘not bring peace or stability to Afghanistan or the border areas of Pakistan’.¹⁰ His words turned out to be prophetic.

Kandahar had always been a dangerous city for foreigners, full of sullen Pushtun bazaars, where people assumed that if you spoke their language it was because you were a spy. Greshnov visited it with a party of foreign journalists in the summer of 1989, a year after the Soviet garrison had left in the first phase of the withdrawal.

The city looked very different from his previous visit in 1983. ‘We drove through the green belt and past the first roadside shops. Everywhere the same hostile, cautious looks. A city of enemies, soaked in hatred for the Soviets. What has changed here? Well, almost nothing, if you ignore the fact that Kandahar has been largely destroyed. I had not seen the consequences of the Soviet air raid which took place on 8 December 1986. Now I saw for the first time how Kandahar looked without the Soviet forces.

‘We stopped opposite the place where there used to be a coffee shop under a sign saying “Toyota”. It was a part of the town I knew well. But the coffee shop was no longer there… Everything was recognisable, but everything was now different. Children clung to the BTRs. “Ingrizi? Feransavi? Amrikai?”… I calmly said that I was a shuravi, a Soviet. They didn’t believe me until I let out a stream of good Russian swearwords. They were overwhelmed by a childish delight which had not been driven out of them by the experience of war: perhaps they’re the only people in Kandahar who did not remember us with hatred. Shoving their dirty fingers into their mouths to show they were hungry, they cried in Russian, “Soviet, Soviet, fuck your mother, good, give us baksheesh, give us a cigarette!”¹¹

Kandahar was still under government control, but it was being regularly bombarded by the forces of Hekmatyar. It had endured two massive attacks in the past few months. Eighty per cent of the shopkeepers in the bazaar, the city governor told Greshnov, were mujahedin taking a rest from fighting. They used to come in for two to three days a month. Now they were coming in for fifteen to twenty days at a time. The number of mujahedin in the region had grown four- or fivefold since the departure of the Soviet forces. They were honest fellows, said the governor. They had no interest in destroying the city; they merely wanted to liberate it. The governor himself was in discreet touch with their leaders.

What were things coming to, wondered Greshnov, when the official governor of a major city started talking about ‘honest mujahedin’?¹²

The Fall of Kabul

In 1989 and 1990 Najibullah’s government had some success in strengthening the armed forces at its disposal. The KhAD had financed the creation of militia forces drawn from the former mujahedin: 100,000 former insurgents are said to have joined the government militias. The 17th Division in Herat—whose mutiny in March 1979 had helped launch the resistance to the Communists—now consisted of 3,400 regular troops and 14,000 militiamen. According to one calculation, the total numbers of security forces available to the government from all sources in 1988 was almost 300,000.¹³

The respite was shortlived. The rebels had not yet learned how to conduct conventional warfare and throughout 1989 the government forces were mostly successful at beating off their attacks.¹⁴ But by the end of the summer of 1990, Afghan government forces were everywhere on the defensive. Masud by now commanded a force of twenty thousand men with tanks and artillery. By the first half of 1991, the government controlled only 10 per cent of Afghanistan, the city of Khost had finally fallen to the rebels, the morale of the army had collapsed, and desertion was rife. Shevardnadze and Kryuchkov had continued to oppose moves to cut off supplies to Najibullah. But Shevardnadze had resigned from the Soviet government in December 1990 and Kryuchkov was arrested after the abortive coup in August 1991. Najibullah no longer had a senior advocate in the Soviet government. The Soviet Union itself was on the verge of economic and political collapse. An Afghan official visiting Moscow at the time remarked, ‘We saw all these empty stores in Moscow and long queues for a loaf of bread and we thought: what can the Russians give us?’¹⁵

Yeltsin, the coming power in Russian politics, had no interest in spending Russian money to ameliorate the consequences of a Soviet disaster. His officials began to talk openly of getting rid of Najibullah in favour of an Islamic government. That autumn Najibullah wrote bitterly to Shevardnadze, ‘I didn’t want to be president, you talked me into it, insisted on it, and promised support. Now you are throwing me and the Republic of Afghanistan to its fate.’¹⁶ In December 1991 the representatives of the KGB finally abandoned Kabul and their long ambition to control Afghan affairs.¹⁷ Even before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Yeltsin and his people had begun to deal directly with mujahedin leaders as part of their overall aim of wresting control of foreign policy from Gorbachev’s government.¹⁸ In January 1992 Yeltsin’s new Russian government cut off military supplies and fuel to Najibullah.

The rot spread very fast. Najibullah’s air force, his most effective weapon against the mujahedin, was grounded for lack of fuel. The rebels continued to receive supplies from Pakistan. They began to capture major cities and terrorist acts started to multiply in Kabul itself. In January 1992, on the fifth anniversary of the launching of his Policy of National Reconciliation, Najibullah publicly blamed the Soviet Union for the disasters that had overtaken Afghanistan and called the day of the Soviet withdrawal ‘the Day of National Salvation’. But his government was now beyond any salvation.

The Russians hung on in Kabul for as long as they could. By now the embassy had been turned into a fortress. It was surrounded by a double concrete wall with steel gates. Before they left in February 1989, Soviet military engineers had spent the whole year building an immense air-raid shelter just by the administrative block. The shelter had its own supply of water and electricity, an air-filter system, a substantial stock of food, and everything else that was necessary for the whole staff of the embassy to hold out there for some time. A large refrigerator was designated as a morgue. A separate secure apartment was set aside for Najibullah in case he should seek political asylum.¹⁹ There was an atmosphere of hectic but suppressed tension inside the embassy in these last days. Fighting continued to grow in the western part of the city and one day the staff were ordered to the shelter, where they spent much time as the embassy and the area around it were increasingly subjected to deliberate rocket and artillery bombardment.²⁰

Galina Ivanov and the other embassy wives lived in the shelter while their men went to their offices to work. There were two or three dozen men there as well. Several of them behaved badly: they let themselves go, did not bother to shave, quarrelled over the ration of food and water, and complained when Galina put a little food aside for the embassy dog. It got so unpleasant that she and the other women took to sleeping in the polyclinic until her husband, Valeri, acting on a hunch, rang to say that an attack was expected any minute: they were to get out of the polyclinic and seek proper shelter in the cellar of the embassy shop. The polyclinic was blown to pieces just as they were leaving and they barely escaped.²¹

The ambassador did what he could to build a workable relationship with such Afghan government as there still was. Soviet trading organisations continued to operate in Kabul under the overall direction of Valeri Ivanov. Yuri Muratkhanian was the director of Afsotr, the joint Soviet-Afghan transport company. On 12 August 1992 he was drinking tea with his wife, Nina, in their flat with Yevgeni Konovalov, the bookkeeper at the Russian trade office, when the building was hit by a shell from a tank. Nina and Konovalov were both mortally wounded, and died a few days later. Their bodies were sealed in zinc coffins and stored in the refrigerator which had been set aside as a morgue. The electricity kept failing and the freon in the refrigerator began to run out. Some Afghan friends braved the bombardment to bring in more.²²

That same evening Najibullah called in the senior Russian military adviser, General Lagoshin, and told him that he and his colleagues—there were by now only seven military advisers left in Kabul—must leave Afghanistan urgently. The rebels would soon take power and he himself could survive in the post of president for only five more days. Najibullah added that, although the Soviets had betrayed him, he felt it was his duty to send the military advisers home safe and sound. And indeed, when the airport authorities put up various obstacles to their departure the next day, Najibullah came personally to the airport to help get them off to Tashkent.²³

The following day Najibullah appealed to the UN to fly him into exile as his government finally fell to pieces. His party was stopped at the airport, which was now controlled by General Dostum, and he sought asylum in what he hoped would be the safe haven of the UN headquarters in Kabul.²⁴

By now it made no sense to keep people in Kabul and the Russians decided to evacuate the embassy. The operation began at four o’clock on the morning of 28 August, when three aircraft left Termez for Kabul. The new ambassador, Yevgeni Ostrovenko, who had only been in Kabul for a few months, drove to the airport with his staff, picking up diplomats from Mongolia, China, Indonesia, and India on the way.

Both what was left of the Afghan government and the mujahedin had guaranteed that the Russian aircraft would land and leave Kabul safely. The three Il-76s flew in, firing flares to decoy rockets. Valeri Ivanov and his wife, Galina, the coffins containing the bodies of Nina Muratkhanian and Yevgeni Konovalov, and a number of other people and goods were loaded on to the first plane. It took off safely, climbing steeply to thirteen thousand feet to avoid the rockets before setting course for home. But then the mujahedin started to bombard the airport. The second aircraft also took off successfully, though several tyres on the undercarriage had been shredded by splinters. But the third aircraft was set on fire, and the ambassador’s wife, who had already gone on board, barely escaped. The paratroopers and aircrew were able to save some documents but no baggage as they jumped out of the aircraft just before it blew up.

The commander of the first aircraft refused to return to pick up those left behind, explaining to Ivanov that he had run out of flares. ‘You would have to pay a very great deal to get me to change my mind,’ he said, presumably as a joke. In Termez—in what was by now independent Uzbekistan—the airport staff refused to refuel the aircraft or supply food and water for the crew and the passengers unless they were given the two KaMAZ lorries the aircraft was carrying as a bribe. That was a measure, Ivanov thought, of how far things had deteriorated since the break-up of the Soviet Union.

The remainder of the embassy staff, including Ambassador Ostrovenko and his wife, had to be ferried out to Mazar-i Sharif in several An-12s provided by General Dostum. From there they were flown home.

One of the soldiers had rescued the bullet-riddled flag from the flagpole on the Russian Embassy. Years later it still hung in his office.²⁵

Those who looked for parallels remembered that, two decades earlier, the American Embassy staff had been rescued from Saigon in circumstances even more humiliating.

There was now no coherent authority in the capital. The Uzbek militia commander General Dostum, who had hitherto been one of Najibullah’s most effective commanders, had joined Masud and Hekmatyar in a drive on the capital. But their unity was ephemeral. The endemic hostility between the various mujahedin factions now broke out in an even more vicious form. Kabul had suffered little during the nine years of the Soviet war. Now much of it was destroyed by indiscriminate bombardment, and its people were subjected to looting, rape, and murder. Masud’s troops were involved in some of the worst atrocities against the Hazara minority. By 1996 some forty thousand of the inhabitants are said to have been killed and two hundred thousand had fled.²⁶

The civil war was brought to an end by the Taliban. Many of them had grown up in the refugee camps in Pakistan and had been educated in the orthodox Muslim schools there. They enjoyed their first success in the spring of 1994, when they captured the town of Spin Boldak on the Pakistani frontier. From then on they moved inexorably forward, capturing Kandahar but checked for a while at Kabul, where Masud seemed to be prevailing. Backed by Pakistan, they then turned their attention to the west of the country, taking over the base at Shindand with its aircraft, and capturing Herat without a fight in September 1995. The fighting around Mazar-i Sharif was marked by massacres on both sides, but the Taliban finally established themselves there in August 1996. Jalalabad and Kabul fell in September.²⁷

For most of the inhabitants of Kabul the victory of the Taliban was, at least at first, a return to a kind of security and some sense of order, even if it was enforced by a brutal version of sharia law. But for Najibullah it was the end. The Taliban forcibly seized him and his brother in the UN headquarters, tortured them, castrated them, and hanged their bodies in the centre of the city.

Masud’s Assassination

At first Masud’s political and military career continued to flourish after the Russians had left. But the changing fortunes and shifting alliances of the civil war, and above all the rise of the Taliban, saw him increasingly on the defensive, under air attack, pushed back from Kabul. He fought with all his old skill, supported by Iran, Uzbekistan, and Russia. But he was eventually driven back into his old base in the Pandsher Valley. There he became leader of the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance, which grouped together the leaders of the small proportion—one-tenth—of the country which was still free of the Taliban.

Despite these setbacks, the Russians continued to build up their links with Masud and the Northern Alliance. He corresponded with President Yeltsin and Yevgeni Primakov (1929–), who at that time was heading the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service.²⁸ In February 1994 Russian representatives came for secret talks with him in Afghanistan. In 1998 Masud sent his Foreign Minister, Abdullah Abdullah, to Moscow for talks about military-technical cooperation and the provision of military assistance. His representatives met with the Russian Chief of Staff, General Kvashnin, Yeltsin’s assistant Sevostyanov, and Deputy Foreign Minister Pastukhov. In 2000 serious fighting flared up again. The Taliban used tanks and aircraft against Masud, who despite being increasingly short of equipment and supplies was able to beat them off. In the spring of that year the Taliban declared a jihad against Russia. In October Masud met the Russian Minister of Defence, Marshal Sergeev, in Dushanbe and the Russians agreed to supply him with weapons and ammunition. The Taliban promptly issued a warning: ‘Russia should cease interfering in the internal affairs of Afghanistan, otherwise it may create for itself many dangerous problems and grave consequences.’ In December 2000, on the proposal of Russia and the United States, the United Nations Security Council agreed on further sanctions against the Taliban. In April 2001 Masud visited the European Parliament in Brussels and asked for help in the fight against the Taliban, whose associates Al Qaeda, he warned, would next turn their attention to the US and Europe.²⁹

At the beginning of September 2001 Arkadi Dubnov, a journalist from Novoe Vremya, was staying in a guest house in the Pandsher Valley, waiting for an interview with Masud, whom he had got to know well since he first started working in Afghanistan in 1993. He shared a room with two Arab journalists who also wanted to interview Masud. The Arabs got their interview on 9 September and killed Masud with a bomb concealed in their TV camera. They were said to be Moroccans from a news agency in London. Scotland Yard therefore investigated the affair and Dubnov was interviewed by them. But the investigation was apparently abandoned for lack of sufficient evidence.³⁰

President Putin (1952–) immediately telephoned President Bush (1946–). ‘I said that Masud, the leader of the Northern Alliance, had just been killed. I told my American colleague: “I’m very worried. Something big is going to happen. They’re planning something.”’³¹ The Twin Towers in New York were bombed two days later. Putin was the first foreign leader to express his condolences to Bush, and immediately took practical steps to support the forthcoming American campaign to destroy the Taliban and Al Qaeda. His people handed over a good deal of intelligence, including minefield maps—many of them inevitably inaccurate after the passage of time. He opened Russian air space to American military flights and persuaded the leaders of the Central Asian states to do the same. He met the leaders of the Northern Alliance, stepped up Russian military support for them, and convinced them to cooperate with the Americans. This collaboration did not flag. The northern supply route through Russia became increasingly important, as the Americans got into trouble with their supply route from Pakistan. The flow of intelligence continued. In October 2010 Russians provided support and advice for a US-led raid on four major narcotics factories, the first joint operation of its kind. Many Russians felt that the Americans were insufficiently grateful for what Putin had done to help them.³²

Once the Americans’ initial campaign was over and a new regime was installed in Kabul, the Russians continued to strengthen their links with the new Afghan regime, travelling to Afghanistan on open and confidential business as officials, journalists, and even tourists, as they had done almost uninterrupted since the end of the Soviet war.

Masud was buried in the Pandsher Valley, on a hill by his native village, Jangalak, and a monument was erected to him immediately. A substantial Russian delegation led by General Varennikov took part in the ceremonies at his grave on the second anniversary of his death. Over the years, as the cult of Masud grew more elaborate, the grave was converted into a massive mausoleum. The Russians continued to pay their annual respects. The Pushtuns looked on with resentment at this glorification of a man who was not one of them and who, they grumbled for years afterwards, had signed ceasefires with the Russians instead of continuing the struggle against them.³³

The 201st Division Fights On

For one of the divisions of the 40th Army the war never stopped. The 201st Division withdraw from Afghanistan to Tajikistan, and remained there after the country became independent on the collapse of the Soviet Union. Its headquarters were in the capital, Dushanbe, and its two regiments were deployed towards the Afghan frontier in Kulabe and Kurgan-Tobe. When civil war broke out in 1992 between the central government and Islamic rebels, the local Tajik conscripts deserted. The Russian officers and warrant officers withdrew to their barracks with their families and refused to surrender to the mob. Yeltsin took the division back under Russian jurisdiction. Its numbers were made up with Russian conscripts and contract soldiers on generous terms, and it formed the core of the peacekeeping force set up by the Commonwealth of Independent States, a grouping of former Soviet republics. The force was disbanded when the civil war ended in 1997, but the division remained in Tajikistan, its status undefined.

The war did not stop for the KGB’s frontier forces either. They too had their headquarters in Dushanbe, with detachments on the Afghan frontier. Some had been involved in operations inside Afghanistan, and some were among the 576 members of the KGB who had died there. Now they continued to guard the frontier between Afghanistan and Tajikistan against drug smugglers and the incursions of bands of fundamentalists anxious to support the Islamic rebels inside the country. They too were eventually brought under Russian jurisdiction. In May 1993 Russia and Tajikistan signed an agreement on friendship and cooperation which handed formal responsibility for the defence of the frontier to Russia.

Attacks against the frontier posts had already started. On 13 July a massive attack was launched in the early hours against the 12th zastava by about four hundred men, a mixture of mujahedin and soldiers from the 55th Infantry Division of the regular Afghan army. The garrison of the zastava consisted of forty-eight frontier force soldiers. Aroused by their watchdog, the garrison made for their battle positions as fire was brought down upon them from the surrounding hills and from the Afghan side of the frontier. The crew of the zastavas’ one BTR were the first to die, even before they could mount their machine. After the twenty-five-year-old commander was killed, his deputy decided that the survivors would have to make a break for safety. A small force from the 201st Division and the Tajik army, backed by a couple of helicopters, was put together to rescue the beleaguered garrison. It ran into mines and ambushes on the only approach road, and the Tajik troops turned back. When the Russian relief force finally got through, they found that twenty-five of the garrison had been killed and their bodies mutilated.

Six members of the garrison were made ‘Heroes of Russia’—four of them posthumously—to join the eighty-six men who had become ‘Heroes of the Soviet Union’ during the Afghan war.³⁴