came to power, Soviet aid was given more or less on its merits. But thereafter it was distorted by the ideologically driven and ultimately futile attempt to build ‘socialism’.5 From the start, many programmes were ill- conceived for local conditions. Many more were ruined in thirty years of fighting. Aid supplies were diverted for private profit or hijacked by the mujahedin.
And all this effort brought the Russians few of the political dividends for which they had hoped. They had almost no influence on the events that led to the murder of Taraki by Amin. They got a closer grip on Amin’s successor, Babrak Karmal. But this brought its own problems. The plethora of Soviet advisers, their micromanagement of everyday business, robbed their Afghan opposite numbers of any sense of responsibility and initiative. Why take risks, if the Soviet comrades were willing to take the risks for you? Faced with interference at all levels in the military as well as the civilian bureaucracy, the Afghans often simply shrugged their shoulders and let the Russians take the strain. Najibullah, who was President of Afghanistan after 1986, described a typical meeting of the Afghan council of ministers: ‘We sit down at the table. Each minister comes with his own [Soviet] adviser. The meeting begins, the discussion becomes heated, and gradually the advisers come closer and closer to the table, so accordingly our people move away, and eventually only the advisers are left at the table.’6
Many of the Soviet advisers genuinely believed in their mission to help the local people and were wholeheartedly enthusiastic about it. The youth adviser and journalist Vladimir Snegirev exulted on his arrival, ‘It may be that we have had the good fortune to witness one of the most brilliant and tragic revolutions of the end of the century.’ He was present in March 1982 at the celebrations for the Afghan New Year in the Kabul stadium. ‘There is a striking contrast,’ he noted, ‘which is only possible here: many of the women on the terraces conceal their faces under the chador—a primitive, medieval superstition; but parachutists are landing in the stadium and they are women too, who grew up in this country. The chador and the parachute. You don’t have to be a prophet to foretell the victory of the parachute.’
For the next months and years Snegirev and many others like him found themselves wrestling with the problem of why this essentially democratic and well-intentioned revolution was so bitterly opposed by so many of the Afghan people. More than twenty years later—after the Afghan civil war, the reign of the Taliban, and the American invasion—Snegirev ruefully recognised how naive he had been: he himself had been living in a decaying Orwellian regime without a future. ‘But the dreams remained: ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Social justice. Down with the oppressors of the working class!’… After all, our own country was huge, and still seemed powerful. Yes, everyone was equally poor, but there was no terrible poverty, and there was a giant industry, canals, hydroelectric stations. Were it not for our sclerotic leadership, people like Brezhnev, everything would work out differently. That’s what I thought, that’s what many people my age thought. When we arrived in Afghanistan, even before we had had time to look round, we began to do what we had prepared ourselves to do for the whole of our previous lives… [H] ere [in Afghanistan] it was as if time had gone backwards… But now a power had arisen in this land which wanted to drag the people from out of their superstition, to give children the chance to go to school, peasants the possibility to plough their fields with tractors instead of oxen, women the opportunity to see the world directly, instead of through the eye slits of the chador. Was that not a revolution? The battle of the future against a past already condemned? And I was part of it.’7
The number of advisers and aid workers increased throughout the summer of 1979—Party advisers, military advisers, technical advisers, advisers on youth affairs from the Komsomol, trade union advisers despite the absence of an Afghan working class, advisers from the Soviet Ministry of Shipping even though the rivers in Afghanistan were barely navigable.8 There were advisers in all the ministries, in the factories, in the transport companies, banks, and educational institutions. The number of advisers in the Foreign and Internal Affairs ministries probably ran into the hundreds.9 Before the war began Soviet experts in Afghanistan were not well paid, even by comparison with experts from other Socialist countries, who might get as much as $1,000 a month. But after the invasion their pay went up, to about $700 a month, significantly more than they would have received back home. The bonus was known, with grim humour, as ‘coffin money’.10
Many of the people who went were well-qualified specialists. Others were enthusiastic amateurs. Many came voluntarily, because they were idealists, or because they wanted adventure, or because that was the only way they could get abroad, or because they thought they could better themselves. Of course, many other people who ended up as advisers in Afghanistan, perhaps the majority, had little choice in the matter. The military and Party political specialists were simply ordered to go. Others were invited to volunteer, which most of them did more or less willingly: it would have been a bad career move to refuse.
There were some sixteen to eighteen hundred Soviet military advisers in Afghanistan by the end of 1980. Sixty to eighty of them were generals. There were three or four officers attached to each Afghan army battalion, four or five in each regiment, eleven or twelve in each division, with interpreters to match.11 They wore Afghan army uniform and were better paid than officers in the 40th Army. Advisers could put together the money for a car in one year, and for the down payment on a cooperative apartment back home in two, something that would take very much longer for an officer on Soviet pay scales. Not surprisingly the regular Soviet military hated the military advisers—the word was not exaggerated, according to Valeri Shiryaev, who served as a military interpreter with an Afghan division. Some Soviet units had notices on the entrance to their bases: ‘No dogs or advisers admitted’.
The attitude of the regular officers changed when it became clear that working with the Afghan army could be very dangerous. Two generals died in action: General Vlasov, and Lieutenant General Shkidchenko, whose helicopter went down while he was directing an Afghan army operation in Khost in January 1982. One in three of the advisers serving in Shiryaev’s division died in 1983–4. Even so, there were cases when Soviet units refused to make space on their helicopters for the evacuation of wounded advisers, saying that since they worked for the Afghans, it was for the Afghans to evacuate them.12
The Party advisers were the most numerous among the civilians. In 1983 the Central Committee of the PDPA had eighty Soviet advisers supported by fifty interpreters. They were intimately involved in the workings of party and government, often writing speeches for senior Afghans, which were then translated into Pushtu or Dari for the politicians to read out.13 These people had no specialised training for their mission beyond a one-week induction course. It seems to have been assumed that the ideological orthodoxies that were supposed to work in the Soviet Union would work just as well in Afghanistan. In practice they worked just as badly, or even worse. Many Party advisers were of poor calibre, especially in the early years, when Afghanistan was regarded as a convenient dumping place for people who were not making the grade back in the Soviet Union. With some honourable exceptions very few of them had any knowledge or understanding of the country and simply attempted to apply to Afghanistan the tired political and organisational formulas which were already failing in the Soviet Union.
The idea of sending Soviet youth advisers to Afghanistan was mooted soon after the April 1978 coup. Between May 1979 and November 1988 about a hundred and fifty officials from the Young Communist League of the Soviet Union, the Komsomol, served in Afghanistan as advisers. Their task was to set up a youth movement in the
The Komsomol advisers were organised into teams to work with children and adolescents, on ideological and international affairs, on publishing, and in the provinces. But initially they concentrated on providing the DOMA with all the proper trappings: a Central Committee, a Secretariat, and departments for organisation, political work with the masses, military-patriotic affairs, work with the ‘young pioneers’, international affairs, financial, and general administrative affairs. They set up committees in the provinces and opened the Central Palace of the
