Pioneers in 1981 in the presence of Karmal’s partner Anakhita Ratebzad. They distributed ten thousand translations of Nikolai Ostrovski’s Socialist realist classic about Stalin’s first Five Year Plan,
Nikolai Zakharov was one of the first to arrive. He landed at Kabul airport in the middle of a firefight and whatever illusions he may have had about his mission were soon dispelled. It was quite clear that his new Afghan colleagues were determined to work in their own way. He noted in his diary that Abdurrahman, a deputy leader of the DOMA, said after a drink too many, ‘In order to achieve total victory we will permit no internal attempts at opposition, even if we have to wade through blood.’16 The young people the DOMA was working with were unpromising material, heavily influenced by Islamic, Maoist, and nationalistic thinking. The advisers did not have the finance to carry through their ideas. Neither the Afghan authorities not the people back in the Soviet Union took much notice of their recommendations. Methods which might have worked in the Soviet Union were quite inappropriate in Afghanistan. As early as December 1981 one adviser ruefully recognised, ‘Copying the Komsomol system of personnel management takes no account of the real circumstances. Even though an instruction has been issued to that effect, there is no unified system of personnel in the country, and one reason for that is that it is not viable.’17 Not surprisingly, most of their efforts were in vain.
Of course, most of the advisers needed interpreters. Some were recruited from Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, where the people spoke languages similar to those in Afghanistan. Others came from the elite academic institutions of Moscow and Leningrad, where the study of Afghanistan, its history, its peoples, its languages, and its culture, could stand comparison with any in the world.
In June 1979 Yevgeni Kiselev was preparing for his final exams in the Oriental Department of Moscow State University. Soviet Union students were normally posted on graduation to jobs picked for them by the authorities. Kiselev was expecting to work for the news agency TASS in Kabul. Instead he was summoned out of the blue to a meeting in the Dean’s office. Here he and a couple of other fellow students met two men in civilian clothes who told them that all postings had been cancelled. All that year’s graduates in Persian and Pushtu were being sent to Afghanistan as interpreters. They were then interviewed by two colonels—polished, refined, polite, typical staff officers—who reminded them that as students they were liable to military service. They were therefore being taken into the army. On 12 July they were flown to Kabul and assigned to Afghan units to work alongside the Soviet military advisers. They wore Afghan military uniform and, like the advisers, were paid more than Soviet officers of the equivalent rank. Kiselev and five others were put to live in a three-bedroomed flat in a new
Another new arrival was Andrei Greshnov. He hoped to complete his studies in Kabul, but he had not yet passed the exam on the History of the Communist Party, an essential qualification for any foreign trip. He just scraped through, and was sent on his way after a short course at the Institute of African and Asian Studies on how to comport himself as a Soviet citizen abroad. But instead of continuing his studies as he had hoped, he was brutally told that he was going to be an interpreter with the Afghan army. If he refused, he would be excluded from the university. Two weeks later, without having taken his final exams, he too was on the aeroplane to Kabul. He discovered as soon as he landed that the Farsi he had learned at university had little in common with the Dari spoken on the Kabul streets: he could not understand what the airport workers were saying. He was assigned to the same apartment as Kiselev.19
Women went to Afghanistan during the war for various reasons. If they were in the military they were simply posted, whether they liked it or not. By the 1980s women made up just over 1.5 per cent of the total numbers in the Soviet armed forces.20 Unlike the women who fought in the Second World War as bomber and fighter crews, as tank commanders, as snipers, these women served on the headquarters staff as archivists, cipher clerks, and interpreters, at the logistics base in Pul-i Khumri and in Kabul, or in the military hospitals and front-line medical units as doctors and nurses. Female civilian contract workers began to arrive in 1984 and worked in offices, in regimental libraries, as secretaries, in military stores and laundries, in Voentorg (the network of military shops). The commander of the 66th Independent Motor-rifle Brigade in Jalalabad even managed to get hold of a typist who could double up as a hairdresser.21
The volunteers had mixed motives. Doctors and nurses went to work in the military hospitals and forward medical stations out of a sense of professional commitment and duty. Some tended the wounded under fire, as their predecessors had done in the Second World War, and dealt with the most horrible wounds within days of arriving in Afghanistan.22 Some went for personal reasons: because their private lives had failed or because they badly needed the extra money. In Afghanistan they were fed regularly and for nothing, and they received a double salary.23 Some went out of a spirit of adventure: service as a civilian employee with Soviet forces abroad was one of the few ways a single woman with no connections could travel. Unlike the women in the military, the civilians could always break their contracts if they did not like what they found in Afghanistan: within a week they could be back in the Soviet Union.
Lena Maltseva went from a genuine sense of idealism and adventure, to make her own contribution to the help her country was giving the Afghan people. She was nineteen, a student at the Medical Institute in Taganrog. In 1983 she wrote to
The female volunteers, like the conscripts, were processed through their local Voenkomat. Many hoped to go to Germany, but there were few vacancies there and the officers in the Voenkomats needed to make up the quota for Afghanistan. So they persuaded or bullied the women to go there instead.
Though the women did not fight, they did from time to time come under fire. Forty-eight civilian employees and four
Like the soldiers, the women were first sent to a transit camp in Kabul until their final destination was decided. Some enterprising women got so bored with waiting that they took matters into their own hands. The twenty-year-old Svetlana Rykova hitched a flight from Kabul to Kandahar, then persuaded a helicopter pilot to take her to Shindand, the great airbase in western Afghanistan. There she was offered a job in the officers’ mess. She refused it and held out until a vacancy opened as assistant to the director of financial services. She served in Afghanistan from April 1984 to February 1986.
Tatiana Kuzmina was a single mother in her early thirties. She served in Jalalabad first as a nurse, but then managed to wangle a job in a BAPO (Boevoi Agitatsionno-Propagandistski Otryad), a Military Agitation Propaganda Detachment. Tatiana was the only woman in this unit, which delivered food, medicine, and propaganda to the mountain villages around Jalalabad, put on concerts, and helped the sick and the mothers with their new babies. While she was out on a mission with the detachment on the eve of her final return to the Soviet Union, she was drowned in a mountain river. It was two weeks before her body was found.28
Lilya, a highly qualified typist on the staff of one of the military districts back in the Soviet Union, was not
