Afgantsy

of Tajikistan. They had no documents of any kind and no money. At the airport they were met by a colonel of the frontier guards, who had heard nothing of their arrival. There was a bad moment until they convinced him who they were. The wounded were then sent to hospital in Tashkent. The rest went on to Moscow. Here they were received with honour, but told that they were in no circumstances to talk about what they had done, and made to sign a secrecy agreement. The secrecy was such that medals—not as many as the men had hoped for—were handed out in hugger-mugger. Colonel Boyarinov, who had been killed by friendly fire, was posthumously made a Hero of the Soviet Union. Kryuchkov went in secret to his Moscow apartment to give the medal personally to his wife and son.³⁵

The men were then sent off for two weeks to a sanatorium in the countryside, where they were treated for stress. Some dealt with their stress in the traditional way, by drowning their nightmares in vodka. Leonid Gumenny found the adjustment hard: ‘I was tormented by terrible insomnia. I slept no more than two hours a night. My dreams were in colour, and before I could even get off to sleep I could smell shit, gunpowder, and blood—the smell of death. I was only able to get myself back together—more or less—six months later, after treatment in a sanatorium in Sochi.’

The men of the Muslim Battalion flew home on 9 January. Before taking off they too were relieved by the military policemen of the KGB of all the souvenirs they had picked up after the battle—ornamental daggers, a couple of pistols, a transistor radio and a tape recorder. A rumour later circulated that the soldiers had brought home jewellery looted from the palace. But they had no more than their personal weapons and no documents with them at all. They knew that they had done something remarkable. But they also knew that their government was determined that the way Amin had been set aside should remain shrouded in the deepest secrecy. One young officer even believed that their aircraft might be shot down before they got home, to ensure that the evidence was destroyed. It was a bizarre and irrational thought: a sign of the strain they had been under, but a sign perhaps also of the way they saw the state which they had been prepared to serve so loyally.³⁶ 

PART II The Disasters of War

We tried to teach the Afghans how to build a new society, knowing that we ourselves had failed to do so… Our army was given tasks which it was in no position to fulfil, since no regular army can possibly solve the problems of a territory in revolt.

Ivan Chernobrovkin¹

– SIX – The 40th Army Goes to War

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

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

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

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

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

The Task

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

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