Afgantsy

their political enemies. ‘Revolutionary Troikas’ arrested people, sentenced them, and executed them on the spot with a bullet in the back of the neck. Amin’s guards were among the first victims. The commanders of units which had remained loyal to Amin were arrested, and the prisons were soon full again. The Russians protested. Karmal replied, ‘As long as you keep my hands bound and do not let me deal with the Khalq faction there will be no unity in the PDPA and the government cannot become strong… They tortured and killed us. They still hate us! They are the enemies of the party!’³

Taraki’s wife had been imprisoned in Pul-i Charkhi in a separate small building surrounded by a wall and barbed wire. Now her place was taken by the women from Amin’s family (the men had all been killed). They operated on Amin’s eldest daughter—the one who had been wounded when the palace was stormed—and then incarcerated her in the prison with her new baby. Najibullah released the women twelve years after their arrest, two years after the official end of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, on the eve of the final collapse of his regime.⁴The large number of Soviet civilians living in Kabul had, of course, no idea of what was going on. Even the new Soviet Ambassador, Fikryat Tabeev, had not been warned what was to happen. He was taken entirely by surprise when the communications conduit exploded and the lights in the embassy went out. His wife was furious that her husband had been left—literally—in the dark.⁵ He called General Kirpichenko for clarification. Kirpichenko replied that he was too busy to talk just then, but would report in the morning.

Andrei Greshnov, a military interpreter with the 4th Afghan Tank Brigade, had stolen a small fir tree in preparation for the New Year, set it up in his apartment in the new microrayon, and decorated it with baubles looted from the officers’ mess. On the wall he wrote ‘Happy New Year 1980’. When he looked in on his old apartment nine years later, the inscription was still there. For several days he had heard the aeroplanes flying into Bagram, taking off and landing in a continual distant roar. Like everyone else, he had assumed that these were the aircraft bringing the regiment which the Soviet government had promised to send to defend Amin. In fact they were bringing in not a regiment but the whole 103rd Guards Air Assault Division, as well as the remaining paratroopers from the 345th Guards Independent Parachute Assault Regiment.

After he had finished work on the evening of 27 December, Greshnov took a bottle of Aist vodka round to his Azerbaijani friend Mamed Aliev, who lived in the old microrayon. Aliev had a splendid Japanese television with a built-in radio, which he had acquired in town in exchange for a pistol which was surplus to his requirements. They turned on the radio. Something odd was happening. Several stations were on air, all calling themselves ‘Radio Kabul’. One, broadcasting in Pushtu, was denouncing the enemies of Amin and the April Revolution. Another, broadcasting in Dari and barely audible through the jammers, claimed that power was passing into the ‘hands of the healthy forces in the party’.

Greshnov and Aliev were frying potatoes and arguing about how much salt to put on them when the firing started. The street outside was lit up as if it were daytime. They rushed out on to the balcony—and rushed straight back in again as tracer bullets whistled around them. Tanks started firing further off.

Greshnov set out for home; the Soviet military advisers would be looking for him to interpret. But as he ducked out of the door, he was gripped by a huge figure in an anorak, armed with a foreign-looking machine gun. He stuttered in Dari that he had to go to work to help defend the regime against counter-revolutionary treachery. ‘Work’s over for today, laddie,’ was the quiet reply in pure Russian. ‘Thank your mother that you were born with fair hair, otherwise you’d have been shot outright. Go back where you came from.’ It was a long time before Aliev opened the door in response to his frantic banging: he was terrified that he would be shot because he looked like an Afghan. The two men spent the night watching through the window as soldiers and civilians were rounded up and taken away, Soviet armoured vehicles clattered around the streets and disorganised firing echoed throughout the city.

Greshnov got home early the following morning. Where there had been a flowerbed on the roundabout outside his house, there was now an anti-tank gun, its barrel trained on his apartment block. The wives of some of the Soviet advisers were giving home-made food to the Soviet soldiers. Out on the street he met Latif, a driver from the 4th Afghan Tank Brigade, who told him, ‘Our tanks were destroyed outside the TV station. No one survived.’ Greshnov swore loudly and asked, ‘Who did that?’ Then he realised he was being stupid: it was of course the Russians who had done it. It took him some time to sort out his loyalties, and when Latif told him that one Afghan tank had knocked out a Soviet armoured personnel carrier before it was destroyed he was briefly delighted.⁶

Alexander Sukhoparov had been an adviser to the PDPA since August 1979. He too could not understand what was happening during the night. He had to get his news from the BBC and other foreign radio stations. On the morning of 28 December Soviet paratroopers arrived to protect the hotel where he was staying. They were in a state of high excitement, but they too had no good idea of what had happened or of why they were there. They asked Sukhoparov about Afghan customs, about the layout of the town, about the attitude of the people to their arrival. It was a cold sunny day and people were wandering the streets, congratulating one another that Amin had been overthrown. ‘They greeted our soldiers warmly,’ Sukhoparov wrote later, ‘gave them flowers, and called them friends and liberators.’⁷

Nikolai Zakharov, a Komsomol official, had arrived in May 1979 to help the Afghans create a Communist youth organisation. He was at the airport on 25 December and saw military vehicles being unloaded from a transport aircraft and soldiers mustering alongside.

‘They’re ours,’ cried Zakharov’s interpreter, Abramov.

‘You’re off your head,’ Zakharov said dismissively. ‘How would our soldiers have got here?’

‘They really are ours,’ said the interpreter. ‘Look at the red stars on their fur hats.’

Three days later Zakharov wrote up his diary: ‘Last night, 27 December, at about 18.30, there was an outbreak of automatic and artillery fire which grew until it reached a maximum at 19.30. The sound of gunfire came from the airport, from the House of the People, and at times very close from the nearby residential area.’ And then he solemnly transcribed the official justification for the overthrow of Amin.⁸

It had been a remarkably daring, successful, and—considering the circumstances—cheap affair. Twenty-nine Soviet soldiers had been killed in action, forty-four in accidents (including the paratroopers who were killed when their transport plane crashed into the mountains as it was coming in to land in Kabul), and seventy-four wounded. Afghan military losses were of course higher: about three hundred dead. There were no civilian casualties because the Russians had not used aircraft to soften up their targets. Almost exactly ten years later, in December 1989, the Americans invaded Panama to oust General Noriega. The military casualties suffered by both sides were similar to those suffered in Kabul. But because the Americans used aircraft, there were also civilian casualties, the number of which remains a matter of controversy.⁹

The operation seemed to have been politically successful as well. An oppressive ruler had been removed and one agreeable to the Soviets had been installed. Dmitri Ryurikov and his colleagues in the Soviet Embassy were sent out to canvass opinion. All reported that their Afghan contacts were pleased Amin had gone. But some had added, ‘We are glad to see you. But you will be very well advised to leave again as soon as you can.’¹⁰ As they fanned out through Afghanistan, the Soviet troops heard much the same thing: their arrival was welcomed, sometimes with flowers; but they too were reminded that their early departure would be even more welcome.

Protesters and Doubters

But back in the Soviet Union the first few protests were voiced almost immediately. A handful of dissenters—Yelena Bonner, the wife of Andrei Sakharov, and others—issued a statement on 29 January 1980. They entirely rejected the official version of events and the contention of the authorities that the Soviet people wholeheartedly supported their action. ‘There is a war in Afghanistan, Afghans are dying and our own boys are dying too, the children and grandchildren of those who survived the Second World War and those who did not return from it.’ They appealed to those who remembered the earlier war, those who remembered Vietnam, people of goodwill everywhere, to demand that the Soviet troops be withdrawn in accordance with the resolution which had just received overwhelming support at an emergency meeting of the UN General Assembly.

Andrei Sakharov, the Nobel Prize winner who had helped develop the Soviet hydrogen bomb, also demanded