Afgantsy

paid enough to take her through to the end of the month and she made up the difference by collecting bottles for salvage. She could not afford adequate clothing for the winter. But in the 40th Army she was warm and well fed, beyond what she had believed possible.²⁹

Many women did get married, often while they were still in Afghanistan, whether that was their original intention or not. One said, ‘All of us women are lonely and frustrated in some way. Try to live on 120 roubles a month, as I do, especially if you want to dress decently and have an interesting holiday once a year. “They only go over there to find themselves a husband,” people often say. Well, what’s wrong with that? Why deny it? I’m 32 years old and I’m alone.’³⁰ Marriages could only be formally registered with the Soviet authorities in Kabul. A young couple from the 66th Independent Motor-rifle Brigade in Jalalabad were killed by rocket grenade fire on the road to the airport shortly after they had left the garrison. Natasha Glushak and her fiance, an officer from the brigade’s communications company, managed to get to Kabul and register their marriage. Instead of flying back, they returned aboard a BTR. Just as it was arriving at Jalalabad, it was blown up by a remotely detonated mine. Only the upper half of Natasha’s body was recovered.³¹

The women were far outnumbered by the men, whose attitude to them was mixed. Colonel Antonenko, who commanded the 860th Independent Motor-rifle Regiment, said, ‘There were forty-four women in the regiment: nurses, laboratory assistants in the water purification station, waitresses, cooks, a canteen manager, shop assistants. We had no store of blood. When the regiment came out of battle, if we had wounded, the women would occasionally give their own blood. That really happened… Our women were wonderful and worthy of the highest praise.’³²

There was no dispute about the role of the nurses and doctors. One nurse remembered when soldiers brought in a wounded man, but wouldn’t leave, saying, ‘We don’t need anything, girls, can we just sit by you for a bit?’ Another remembered how one young boy, whose friend had been blown to pieces, couldn’t stop talking to her about it.³³ A telephone operator in a Kabul hotel who visited a mountain outpost where the men often saw no one for months at a time was asked by the commander, ‘Miss, would you take off your cap? I haven’t seen a woman for a whole year.’ All the soldiers came out of the trenches just to look at her hair. ‘Here, back home,’ one nurse later remarked, ‘they’ve got their mums and sisters and wives. They don’t need us now—but over there they told us things you wouldn’t normally tell anybody.’³⁴

After he left the Central Hospital for Infectious Diseases in Kabul, where he had been treated for a mixture of typhus, cholera, and hepatitis, one young officer started an affair with the nurse who had looked after him. His envious fellow officers told him maliciously that she was a witch. She drew portraits of her lovers and hung them on the wall of her room. His three predecessors had all been killed in action. Now she began to draw him too. He was half gripped by the superstition. But she never finished the drawing and he was only wounded, not killed. ‘We soldiers were very superstitious while the war was going on,’ he later said ruefully. He lost touch with his nurse after leaving Afghanistan. But he always preserved the warmest memory of her.³⁵

At the end of the day the nurses got little official recognition for what they had done. Alexander Khoroshavin, who served in the 860th Independent Motor-rifle Regiment in Faisabad, discovered to his disgust twenty years after the war that Ludmila Mikheeva, who had been a nurse with the regiment in 1983–5, was not entitled to any of the benefits which even the most unprepossessing veteran received for his service in Afghanistan.³⁶

The women were too often subjected to unbearable pressure from men prepared to use threats as well as blandishments. Many of the veterans talked of them with distasteful contempt. They called them chekistki, implying that they sold themselves for cheki, cheques, the special currency used by the Soviets in Afghanistan. Some conceded that women who went to Afghanistan as nurses and doctors may have done so for the best of reasons. But few of them had a good word for the others, the secretaries, the librarians, the storekeepers, or the laundrywomen. These they accused of going to Afghanistan solely in search of men and money.

The women themselves always resented the slander. They resorted to a variety of defensive tactics. Some accepted one protector in order to keep the others off.³⁷ Many Second World War generals, such as Rokossovski and Zhukov, had ‘Field Service Wives’ (PPZh—Pokhodno-Polevaya Zhena), who travelled with them from post to post. Now the institution was revived: it is portrayed with compassion by Andrei Dyshev in his novel PPZh, about a volunteer nurse, Gulya Karimova, and her lover Captain Gerasimov.³⁸

Valeri Shiryaev, the military interpreter, thought that all this represented the social reality inside Russia itself: many of the men came from the provinces and regarded women as prey or as something to be knocked about. But at least in Afghanistan the Party representatives sensibly did not try to interfere with people’s relationships as they would have done back home. There were inevitable tensions: ‘The smaller the garrison, the fewer the women, and the greater the competition, which sometimes led to fights, duels, suicide, and the search for death in battle.’³⁹

Not all the Soviet women in Afghanistan came there in the service of the Soviet state. Some came as the wives of Afghans, often students, whom they had met at home. Galina Margoeva was the wife of the engineer Haji Hussein. She and her husband remained in Kabul through all the changes in regime, through the horrors of the civil war and the depredations of the Taliban, living in their apartment in the microrayon by the housing construction combine near the airport. Tania was the wife of Nigmatulla, an Afghan officer who had trained in the Soviet Union and married her despite the opposition of her family and his own superiors. Their first child was born in Minsk. After five years he was posted first to Kabul, then to Kandahar and then to Herat. He continued to serve despite the changes of regime: he was the political officer of a division under Najibullah, a brigade under the mujahedin, and a division again under the Taliban. Tania was with him throughout. She wore the veil, learned Farsi, but remained an atheist. When Nigmatulla’s three brothers were killed, she took the nine orphans into her family and brought them up with her own children.⁴⁰

Life and Death in Kabul

In Kabul there was a curfew after eight o’clock, you could not safely walk in a large part of the city, and there was always shooting at night. Although the city was heavily garrisoned and its streets were continually patrolled by troops, police, and armoured vehicles, the mujahedin occasionally mounted attacks inside Kabul itself. In January 1981 they got close enough to the villa of the Chief Soviet Military Adviser in the embassy quarter to attack it with rocket-propelled grenades. The same day they attacked—unsuccessfully—a key electric power station some twenty-five miles outside Kabul. The following day a large cinema and the Soviet bookshop were blown up. In the next few days there were more than two hundred terrorist attacks in other major cities.⁴¹ In 1983 a bomb under the table in Kabul University dining room killed nine Soviets, including a woman professor.⁴²

People always carried their personal weapons and every apartment block had an armed guard. Nevertheless the capital was thought to be safe enough for senior officials and military advisers to bring their wives and families to live with them. Their standard of living was often higher than it would have been at home. Most lived in the microrayon, the pay was good, parcels and letters arrived regularly. The children were educated in the embassy school: it had to work in three shifts to accommodate them all, and even so it was overcrowded. You could watch the latest Soviet films in the embassy or the Soviet House of Culture.

The range in the embassy shop was limited, and the wives could buy only the goods that matched their husbands’ rank. So they spent much of their time shopping in the local market in the old microrayon, the parvanistka, a Russification of the words parva nist—‘not to worry’. Here they could find Western consumer goods and clothes which none of them had ever seen back home, some of it sent by Western aid agencies to relieve the Afghan poor. They bargained ruthlessly for second-hand jeans, jackets, and dresses, despite threats from the authorities to send them straight back to the Soviet Union if they persisted in shopping. Needless to say, the threats had no effect.⁴³

As the security situation deteriorated, greater constraints were placed upon the Soviet women in Afghanistan. In Jalalabad, after a number had been killed, women were not allowed to go on the streets without an